The Trump administration has closed down an investigation of NewsGuard, a group that rates news websites and which had been accused of being used to justify boycotts of conservative outlets.
The Federal Trade Commission told a federal judge that the investigation was no longer necessary after the government secured an agreement in a separate lawsuit with major ad agencies that agreed not to collude in using NewsGuard or other ratings firms to control how they buy ad space.
Once that settlement was reached with Dentsu, WPP and Publicis, three major ad agencies, the FTC decided it no longer needed to pursue its probe into NewsGuard’s practices, the government said in a court filing Friday.
“The relief obtained in Dentsu, which marks the culmination of the commission’s investigation in this area, resolved the issues related to NewsGuard that gave rise to the [civil investigative demand], and the commission therefore no longer requires compliance with the CID,” FTC lawyer Alan Bakowski told the judge.
NewsGuard had fought against complying with the FTC’s demand for information, saying FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson viewed the firm as being “biased against conservative publications.”
NewsGuard said the probe was an unconstitutional intrusion on its free speech rights.
The FTC said the fact that it won the settlement with the ad agencies was proof that it wasn’t retaliating against NewsGuard over its viewpoints.
But Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard’s co-CEO, said the firm doesn’t have contracts with those ad agencies. He said that fact undercut the FTC’s claims that it was probing NewsGuard over worries about market competition.
“We’re amazed to see the FTC jawboning ad agencies, which are private companies, to engage in a speech-based, group boycott of ratings like ours, simply because the chairman of the agency is biased against our speech,” Mr. Crovitz said.
“The FTC cannot lawfully censor our journalism of assessing websites or the rights of advertisers to use information like ours to decide where their ads should run,” he said.
NewsGuard says it employs journalists to make its ratings of news outlets and claims to be apolitical.
It says it doesn’t try to influence ad buyers’ decisions, but rather offers information for others to make judgments about the news sources they look to.
The firm judges websites by nine criteria, such as whether they publish misleading information, correct errors and divide news and opinion.
