A First Amendment Win: The FTC Walks Away From Its Yearlong Assault on NewsGuard

In a huge win for the First Amendment, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has abandoned a yearlong effort to punish a private media ratings company for its political viewpoints.

On April 17, the FTC withdrew the civil investigative demand (CID) it had used since last May to harass NewsGuard, whose offense was publishing ratings that commission leadership believed were biased against conservative outlets. The 21-page subpoena contained 31 specifications, essentially calling for every record NewsGuard had produced or received since its 2018 founding. The company spent seven months negotiating, produced more than 40,000 pages of material, and sat for 10 meet-and-confer sessions before finally suing in federal court in February.

NewsGuard rates news websites for reliability using nine disclosed journalistic criteria, selling access to consumers, advertisers, and AI developers. By any honest reckoning, it is a journalism company exercising editorial judgment in precisely the manner the Supreme Court affirmed last year in Moody v. NetChoice, applying its own constitutionally protected judgement to what it perceives as political leanings. The commission nonetheless opened what is fundamentally an antitrust investigation without ever specifying the alleged violation of law (as required by the FTC Act).

The FTC’s pattern of conduct makes its viewpoint-based motive unmistakable. In November 2024, commissioner and future chair Andrew Ferguson posted on X that NewsGuard had led “collusive ad-boycotts” designed to “censor the speech of conservative and independent media in the United States.” The following month, a concurring statement from Ferguson claimed that the company “seems to give a free pass to deceptive and biased news coverage by major left-leaning outlets.” He also stated at an April 2025 antitrust conference that the FTC’s “tremendous array of investigative tools and coercive power” would be used to make publishers “do what we say”—a chilling display of government power designed to intimidate and coerce American citizens out of their free speech.

In parallel, the commission conditioned approval of the Omnicom-Interpublic merger on a provision forbidding the combined company from using any third-party news ratings—a restriction that functionally prohibits Omnicom from contracting with NewsGuard. That provision was not in the initial draft consent order. Newsmax, a conservative outlet with a low NewsGuard score, filed a 14-page comment demanding that NewsGuard be swept in, and the FTC obliged. The result is a government-crafted speech blacklist imposed on the world’s largest ad-buying company as payment for merger approval.

All of this maps cleanly onto the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2024 decision in National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, which held that government officials may not use their regulatory authority to coerce third parties into suppressing disfavored speech. The Vullo test asks whether a reasonable person would read official conduct as a regulatory threat, and if so, whether that threat is aimed at speech the government dislikes. The subpoena issued by Ferguson—an official who has publicly declared his intent to punish a specific company’s ratings—meets that standard as cleanly as any other post-Vullo case. Representing NewsGuard, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression argued that the commission’s conduct was deliberately designed to “burden and bleed” the company through compliance costs and chilled customer relationships.

A similar case brought by Media Matters against an equally sweeping FTC subpoena produced a preliminary injunction last August, with the district court finding that “retaliatory animus was the but-for cause of the FTC’s CID.” The D.C. Circuit has since signaled deep skepticism of the commission’s position on appeal. Taken together, the two cases establish a judicial trend that the FTC’s legal team evidently read clearly enough to retreat before being ordered to do so.

While withdrawing the CID resolves immediate First Amendment harms and gives promise that these bully tactics are scrutinized correctly, it leaves the deeper architecture of coercion intact. The Omnicom merger condition remains in force, as do similar restrictions imposed on Dentsu, WPP, and Publicis in related settlements. NewsGuard has indicated it will continue litigating the merger restriction—as it should. The FTC’s jawboning tactic has changed from a direct demand for documents to an indirect strangulation of the business relationships that sustain the speaker.

The broader lesson extends well beyond any single agency. The architecture of informal government censorship depends on a tool kit that includes burdensome investigations, merger conditions, public threats tied to regulatory authority, and advisory letters warning private companies to adjust their editorial practices to avoid legal exposure. Handed down six decades ago, the Supreme Court’s foundational Bantam Books decision was supposed to foreclose exactly this pattern, and Vullo made clear it still does. What is missing is a legislative response that matches the problem.

R Street has argued that Congress should strip the Federal Communications Commission of the open-ended authority that allows its chair to threaten broadcasters over disfavored coverage; the same logic applies with equal force to the FTC’s use of CIDs and merger conditions to punish disfavored speakers. The two agencies may be using different statutory hooks to accomplish the same thing, but both cases have the same solution: Congress must take their tools away. Introduction of the forthcoming JAWBONE Act would be a meaningful step in that direction, giving private speakers a reliable statutory remedy against the pattern of coercion that Vullo and Bantam Books already forbid.

For NewsGuard, last week’s filing is a partial vindication. For the broader information ecosystem, it is a reminder of how much regulatory burden a single agency can impose on a speaker before the legal system catches up, as well as how much of that burden never eases—even when the agency retreats. It is time for the country to push back on these bully tactics and reclaim free speech.