The left found a way to silence conservative media without banning a single word.
A company called NewsGuard has been running that operation for years – and Trump just sent the FTC after them.
Now the scores they've been hiding are about to become very public.
How NewsGuard Used Advertising Dollars to Blacklist Conservative Media
Most Americans have never heard of NewsGuard.
That's by design.
NewsGuard sells itself as a tool to fight online "misinformation" – assigning trust ratings to thousands of news websites based on what its staff decides counts as accurate journalism.
What it actually does is assign low scores to conservative outlets, high scores to left-wing ones, and sell those ratings to the ad agencies that control where every major brand spends its money.
A low score doesn't just hurt feelings.
Advertisers get told to stay away, revenue dries up, and the outlet slowly disappears.
That's the business model.
NewsGuard gave Newsmax – one of the most-watched conservative news networks in America – a score of 20 out of 100.
Their verdict: "this website is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards."
Meanwhile, The Washington Post – the paper that spent years pushing the Russia collusion hoax – scores a perfect 100.
Jacobin, the openly socialist magazine, scores 92.5.
Fox News scores 66.
NewsGuard Bias by the Numbers: A 27-Point Gap That Held for Three Years
The Media Research Center ran the numbers three years in a row and got the same result every time.
Left-leaning outlets averaged 93 out of 100.
Right-leaning outlets averaged 66 out of 100.
That's a 27-point gap – and it held year after year after year.
NewsGuard calls itself apolitical.
Their own scores say otherwise.
The Hunter Biden laptop story tells you everything you need to know about who these people really are.
When the New York Post broke the story in October 2020, NewsGuard co-CEO Steve Brill declared it "a hoax perpetrated by the Russians."
The New York Times and NPR both dismissed the Post's verified reporting as disinformation – and both received a 100/100 credibility rating from NewsGuard for doing it.
The Post's story was accurate.
The federal government later confirmed the laptop's authenticity.
NewsGuard never changed Brill's 100/100 ratings for the outlets that got the story wrong.
That's not a fact-checking organization.
That's a political operation.
The FTC launched its investigation after congressional investigators connected NewsGuard's services to what court papers described as "coordinated actions to demonize disfavored media entities."
That's federal investigators' language – not a conservative talking point.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson made his position clear long before he took the job: "Censorship, even if carried out transparently and honestly, is inimical to American democracy."
He followed through.
NewsGuard fought the investigation for eight months before finally suing the FTC to shut it down.
A company with nothing to hide waited eight months before going to court.
FTC Hits NewsGuard Where It Hurts and Conservatives Are Winning
The FTC's investigation isn't the only pressure NewsGuard is feeling.
The agency also blocked the merger of two of the world's biggest media buying firms – Omnicom and IPG – unless the combined company agreed to stop using services that rate and rank news sites.
That single condition cost NewsGuard significant business.
The message to the rest of the industry was unmistakable: the days of hiding political censorship behind bogus credibility scores are over.
While NewsGuard was busy blacklisting conservative outlets, the Biden administration was cutting it checks.
The Pentagon awarded NewsGuard a $750,000 contract for its "Misinformation Fingerprints" project – a taxpayer-funded database of stories the government wanted suppressed.
Your tax dollars paid for the operation targeting your news sources.
The Federalist questioned cloth mask mandates during COVID and got a 12.5 from NewsGuard – lower than Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times, which scored a 39.5.
An American conservative publication rated less trustworthy than a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.
That's not a credibility rating system.
That's a targeting system.
And Trump's FTC just named it for what it is.
NewsGuard's lawsuit complains the investigation "will continue until NewsGuard knuckles under."
Good.
Sources:
- Media Research Center, "STUDY: NewsGuard Ratings System Heavily Skews in Favor of Left-Wing Outlets," NewsBusters, December 13, 2021.
- Media Research Center, "EVEN WORSE! MRC Exposes NewsGuard for Leftist Bias Third Year in a Row," NewsBusters, December 12, 2023.
- Newsmax spokesman Bill Daddi, quoted in AP/Washington Times reporting, March 15, 2026.
- FTC court filing, NewsGuard Technologies v. FTC, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, January 16, 2026.
- Andrew Ferguson, FTC Chairman, quoted in antitrust conference remarks, April 2025.
- Rep. Jim Banks, letter to U.S. Cyber Command, May 2022.
- Breitbart News, "The Pentagon Awarded NewsGuard a $750K Contract Last Year," April 29, 2022.
