Trump's FTC accused of hatching revenge plot to crush media ratings firm

A new lawsuit alleges that President Donald Trump's Federal Trade Commission is trying to run a media ratings company out of business in retaliation for it giving poor marks to outlets that support the Republican Party.

According to The Washington Post, NewsGuard, founded in 2018 by two former media executives, "researches news sites and assigns them 'reliability ratings' based on their journalistic standards, selling these scores to readers, tech platforms and advertisers that want to steer clear of low-quality sources. The company, which insists it is rigorously nonpartisan, has made enemies in recent years by giving low ratings to conservative outlets such as the right-wing cable news channels Newsmax and One America News."

In their lawsuit, NewsGuard alleges that the FTC has undertaken multiple moves designed to crush the company's business as an act of political revenge.

"Last May, Trump’s FTC launched an investigation of NewsGuard, ordering the company to hand over the names of all its clients, virtually every document and communication it has ever produced related to its news ratings, and all of its financial reports since the time of its founding, the company alleges," said the report. "Then, before approving a $13 billion merger that created the world’s largest ad agency, the FTC included an order that effectively blocks the newly formed goliath from ever doing business with companies like NewsGuard."

These measures, the lawsuit said, are a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments comparable to “the witch hunts of the McCarthy era,” and a reflection of right-wing FTC chair Andrew Ferguson's crusade to “brazenly [use] its power not for any issue concerning trade or commerce, but rather to censor speech.”

This comes after federal courts sharply rebuked the FTC last year for an investigation into the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, allegedly for colluding with advertisers to block tech billionaire Elon Musk's X platform from receiving ad revenue. Media Matters had triggered several advertiser withdrawals from the site by revealing to the public how frequently the ads were being displayed next to antisemitic and neo-Nazi content.