LAWSUIT: FIRE sues Federal Trade Commission over agency’s targeting of news rating service

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2026 — For almost a year, the Federal Trade Commission has unconstitutionally used its broad regulatory powers to attack NewsGuard, a private news organization, because it doesn’t like its news ratings.

Now, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of the company to protect NewsGuard’s First Amendment rights and remind the federal government it has no business using its power to censor journalism whose reporting it opposes.

“NewsGuard’s rating service is quintessential journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere said, “and the Supreme Court has unanimously affirmed that the government has no legitimate role in saying what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks is biased.” 

Since its founding in 2018 by veteran journalists L. Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV, NewsGuard has published ratings of the reliability of news websites based on fully disclosed journalistic criteria. These criteria include whether news sites verify their information, regularly correct errors, and disclose ownership and financing, among other transparency metrics. NewsGuard’s services are used by consumers and businesses alike, including advertisers, to weigh the credibility of news platforms where their ads may appear.

Websites across the political spectrum earning low scores have objected to their ratings. In recent years, some conservative websites earning lower scores than their conservative competitors have sought government censorship of the ratings.

FIRE’s lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, lays out three ways in which the federal government violated the company’s First Amendment rights:

• FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and the agency engaged in unconstitutional retaliation against NewsGuard based on its perceived viewpoints.
• The government violated the First and Fourth Amendments by an unjustified and overly burdensome civil investigation into the company’s operations.
• The FTC unconstitutionally targeted NewsGuard for its First Amendment activity, including by conditioning a merger last fall between advertising companies Omnicom and IPG on a prohibition against the new conglomerate using news rating services when determining where to buy ads — drafted and amended to ensure the ban would prohibit access to NewsGuard’s ratings.

FIRE is seeking an injunction to stop the FTC’s excessive investigation into NewsGuard’s practices and to stop the government from enforcing the merger condition.

“Disagreement over news coverage is precisely the kind of expression the First Amendment protects,” Corn-Revere said. “If the government, regardless of the party in charge, can use its levers of power to punish an organization over its coverage, there’s no reason it can’t do the same to pursue other news organizations that it disfavors.”

NewsGuard’s statement on today’s filing is available here.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them. 

CONTACT:
Karl de Vries, Director of Media Relations, FIRE: 215-717-3473; media@fire.org