# NewsGuard NewsGuard is a for-profit company, founded in 2018 by Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz, its co-CEOs. It rates news websites for credibility. It sells the ratings to consumers, but mainly to advertising firms, which use them to decide where ads run, and to AI companies. It also tracks state-sponsored disinformation in its "Reality Check" newsletter. That combination — a tool that steers ad money away from low-rated outlets — made it one of the main targets of the right's "censorship industrial complex" campaign. Outlets it rated poorly include [[Newsmax]], scored at 20 out of 100. ## Russia work - **Disinformer of the Year:** [[Mark Dougan]] for 2024, and Yevgeny Shevchenko of the [[Pravda Network]] for 2025 (announced January 27, 2026). - **March 2025 AI audit:** ten leading chatbots repeated Pravda-network false narratives in 33.55% of 450 responses. - **Storm-1516:** in October 2024 NewsGuard estimated that content from Dougan and associated Russians had drawn 64 million views since September 2023. ## The campaign against it | Date | Action | |---|---| | June 13, 2024 | House Oversight Chair [[James Comer]] opens an investigation, seeking documents on government contracts and a 2021 Pentagon contract (about $749,000, through the Air Force Research Lab, to identify state-backed information operations) | | Nov 13, 2024 | FCC Commissioner (soon Chair) [[Brendan Carr]] writes to the CEOs of Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft calling NewsGuard part of a "censorship cartel" and suggesting reliance on it could threaten [[Section 230]] protection | | Dec 2024 | Sen. [[Ted Cruz]] accuses NewsGuard of pushing a left-wing agenda | | Mar 2025 | A federal judge dismisses Consortium News's suit against NewsGuard (a challenge from the left), finding the ratings are protected opinion | | May 2025 | The [[FTC]] under Chair [[Andrew Ferguson]] serves a sweeping Civil Investigative Demand reaching back to 2018, including customer lists. NewsGuard produces over 40,000 pages | | 2025 | The FTC's consent order approving the Omnicom–IPG merger bars the merged firm from using news-rating services. The language was added after Newsmax filed a comment naming NewsGuard more than a dozen times. Similar terms appear in other ad-agency orders | | Feb 6, 2026 | NewsGuard, represented by FIRE, sues the FTC and Ferguson for First Amendment retaliation | | Apr 17, 2026 | The FTC withdraws the investigative demand | | Apr 22, 2026 | Judge Dabney Friedrich denies a preliminary injunction without prejudice. The Omnicom restriction, now mirrored in the Dentsu, Publicis and WPP orders, stays in force | | Oct 6, 2026 | The D.C. Circuit hears the appeal. Reported panel: Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia. The judges pressed NewsGuard on irreparable harm, and Millett asked how far the word "practice" reaches in the Omnicom decree. Decision reserved; no ruling as of October 9 | ## Why it matters for the KB NewsGuard is the test case for how the anti-"censorship" campaign moved from congressional letters (2024) to regulatory power (the 2025 FTC demand and merger conditions). The shift came once allies of the campaign — Carr at the FCC, Ferguson at the FTC — controlled the agencies. The merger condition is the sharper tool: without punishing NewsGuard directly, it closes off NewsGuard's market among the largest ad buyers. ## See Also - [[Pravda Network]] - [[Storm-1516]] - [[Brendan Carr]] - [[Andrew Ferguson]] - [[FTC]] - [[Fact-Checking]] - [[Twitter Files]]