NewsGuard Technologies, the company that rates news outlets on credibility and transparency, is suing the Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission. As this paper previously reported, the lawsuit filed in February accuses the FTC of retaliating against NewsGuard for exercising its First Amendment rights. [1]

The core allegation: the FTC, under Chairman Andrew Ferguson, barred the advertising conglomerate Omnicom from using NewsGuard's ratings as a condition of approving its merger. NewsGuard says this was punishment — that the government used its regulatory power to destroy a private company's business because it did not like what the company said about certain media outlets. [2]

The meta-level is what matters. NewsGuard does not publish news. It rates the people who publish news. It is infrastructure — the plumbing beneath the advertising ecosystem that determines which outlets are considered trustworthy enough to receive ad dollars. When the government attacks that layer, it is not censoring a story. It is attacking the mechanism by which stories are sorted into credible and non-credible. [3]

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, seeks a declaration that NewsGuard's First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated. The case remains pending.

-- Anna Weber, Berlin