FTC must keep up the fight against NewsGuard and – Latest News
Federal Trade Commission chief Andrew Ferguson is combating the good fight as the company stares down a lawsuit from the “news accuracy rating” company NewsGuard.
We pushed for Ferguson to chair the FTC exactly as a result of “he gets as few others do the insidious ways Big Tech and its handmaidens abuse their enormous economic power to stifle free speech and free thought and the way antitrust law can be marshaled to defeat them.”
The company was performing on simply these rules when it opened its probe of NewsGuard in reference to the $25 billion merger of promoting giants Interpublic and Omnicom.
As our Charles Gasparino reported in late 2024, Trump regulators have been sure to scrutinize “the [ad] agencies’ reliance on so-called news rating services that rank outlets on whether they peddle allegedly inappropriate content such as misinformation,” with issues they work to steer advert {dollars} to “left-leaning news sites and networks.”
NewsGuard most likely isn’t as terrible on this entrance as the late, unlamented Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which closed in the wake of exposés about how it used its “control over some 90% of global marketing spending” to “to go after free speech online,” as a 2024 House Judiciary Committee report put it.
Its execs will even level to how it charges The Post as more correct than some left-wing shops — giving us a ranking of about 70, even because it handed The Washington Post and New York Times excellent 100s.
Our downside, says NewsGuard, is that we characteristic “attention-grabbing headlines and gossip” — which has nothing to do with accuracy — and supposedly “inaccurate and misleading claims about politics.”
Strange: Shouldn’t it rely for one thing that the Times and WaPo went hook, line and sinker for the Russiagate misinformation produced at the behest of Hillary Clinton’s marketing campaign?
Nor that they dumped on our 100% correct reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer? NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill referred to as our laptop computer tales a “hoax” — apparently falling for misinformation planted by the Joe Biden marketing campaign.
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Later in 2020, NewsGuard went after sponsors of the Great Barrington Declaration, the warning from prime minds in medication that pandemic lockdowns have been doing far more hurt than good — a key signal that the company, if not purely serving a lefty agenda, definitely favors institution narratives that so usually come down to the identical factor.
Indeed, left-leaning unbiased journalist Matt Taibbi has slammed NewsGuard’s coziness with authorities insiders; lefty Lee Fang says it “exemplifies the problem” of self-styled “disinformation” consultants demonetizing information publishers “for reporting dissenting views.”
The company claims it has a First Amendment proper to charge because it pleases, however Ferguson from his first days on the job has focused “misinformation” censorship — flagging how the approach the likes of NewGuard stifle the stream of advert {dollars} over supposed “brand safety” points could violate the Sherman Antitrust Act.
If free speech mattered that a lot to those that run NewsGuard, then it wouldn’t even exist. It is designed to control free speech.
Instead, NewsGuard actually is simply anti-competitive graft dreamt up by opportunists to make money from liberal-driven “misinformation” mania — a graft designed to provide elitist promoting and tech executives (who solely vote a method) a purpose to censor and defund voices that signify the views of the half of the nation they will’t abide.
Chairman Ferguson, don’t be deterred.
