As Donald Trump targets news outlets for new lawsuits, his choices to lead key regulatory agencies have a media watchdog in their sights.

NewsGuard, a media reliability rating service launched in 2018, has been the source of claims made by Brendan Carr, incoming chair of the FCC, and Andrew Ferguson, incoming chair of the FTC, as well as Capitol Hill figures such as House Speaker Mike Johnson. Their claim: NewsGuard is out to “blacklist conservative news sources,” as Johnson put it in a statement last week.

But NewsGuard —along with a host of press freedom advocates — argue that not only are the attacks misguided, but they are, ironically enough, the very type of government pressure that threatens to chill speech protected by the First Amendment.

“The Constitution protects the expression of groups like NewsGuard, which simply provide opinions on the credibility of content and information sources that other services may choose to adopt or ignore at their discretion,” Ari Cohn, lead counsel on tech policy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, recently wrote.

NewsGuard was launched in 2018 by co-CEOs Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV, and Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Among other things, the company employs a team of journalists to review news sites and give them a score of 0-100, information that is used by consumers and clients including AI companies, search engines, news aggregators, brands and researchers. Advertisers, for instance, use the data to weigh brand safety, a bigger challenge in an age of programmatic placement.

Carr has long called out major tech platforms for what he sees as censorship of conservative voices, and has even characterized it as a “censorship cartel,” while citing a legal rationale for FCC authority over social media content moderation practices. Last month, in a letter to major tech companies, Carr claimed that NewsGuard was “leveraging its partnerships with advertising agencies to effectively [censor] targeted outlets.” Earlier this month, Ferguson also singled out NewsGuard in a statement, saying that it is “free to rate websites by whatever metric it wants. But the antitrust laws do not permit third parties to facilitate group boycotts among competitors.”

NewsGuard, though, says that Carr and Ferguson are being misled in their attacks by one of the news outlets that scored low, Newsmax, rated 20/100 by their service. Newsmax recently settled a lawsuit brought by Smartmatic after it amplified claims that the election systems company help rig the 2020 presidential election.

When House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer launched an investigation into NewsGuard and appeared on Newsmax last summer, one of its star personalities, Rob Schmitt, said “their goal is obviously to bully conservative media out of existence.”

Moreover, NewsGuard disputes the notion that they are going after conservative sites and not liberal ones.

Responding to Carr’s claims last month, Crovitz emphasized that its service was apolitical and said that “many conservative sites get higher ratings from us than liberal sites get, such as Fox News getting a higher score than MSNBC and The Washington Examiner outscoring The New York Times.” He added that “Newsmax may not like our rating, but that is no excuse for them to validate their low rating with inaccurate claims about NewsGuard or to mislead Commissioner Carr.”

It’s not just Newsmax. Another outlet on the right, One America News Network, also claimed NewsGuard was part of a “radical left” effort to “shut down all opposition,” and it reported on Comer’s investigation into the media ratings service.

“The tack taken by two conservative and far right ones, OAN and Newsmax, has been to publish stories making false claims about our process, and to lobby members of Congress and regulators to threaten to censor us,” Crovitz said.

“And then those members of Congress and regulators mysteriously Newsmax or OAN a scoop that they are coming after us and then they get on their television shows,” said Brill.

“I think about it as an unvirtuous circle,” said Crovitz.

Lawmakers also came to Newsmax’s defense last year when DirecTV pulled the channel from its lineup during a carriage dispute. The satellite company balked at what it saw as “significant fees” being demanded by the media outlet. Newsmax accused DirecTV of a “blatant act of political discrimination and censorship.” Republican lawmakers spoke out against the satellite broadcaster, and even threatened to hold hearings, before a distribution deal was ultimately reached.

Newsmax and OAN did not respond to a list of questions for comment.

In a letter to Carr earlier this month, Brill and Crovitz has pushed back on other claims, including that it rated that Chinese state media as credible, and that they judged the Covid lab leak theory as misinformation. Rather, they wrote that NewsGuard was just the type of service that Carr advocated for in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation playbook for the next administration, rather than leave such selection up to major internet platforms.

NewsGuard touts its service to advertisers as a way for brands to use their data “to craft custom news targeting or safety segments based on their standards. Advertisers can use NewsGuard’s more than 40 data and metadata points to create a campaign that matches their brand-suitability guidelines.”

(Full disclosure: Deadline, which also is rated by NewsGuard, received a 100/100 score.)

NewsGuard outlines how sites are rated and publishes complaints from publishers who take issue their reviews, and some outlets vigorously challenge their score. Among them: The leftward DailyKos and the Russian site Pravda.

One leftward site, Consortium News, sued NewsGuard last year, along with the U.S. government, alleging that a contract with the Department of Defense Cyber Command contract led to “a pattern and practice of labelling, stigmatizing and defaming American media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy, particularly as to Russia and Ukraine.”

Consortium News was given a score of 47.5 out of 100, with the NewsGuard Nutrition Label stating that it “frequently published false and misleading claims about the war in Ukraine and other important subjects.” NewsGuard said that it had “determined that the site repeatedly publishes false content and does not gather and present information responsibly.”

“As a private organization unaffiliated with the United States government, NewsGuard has a First Amendment right to form and disseminate its own opinions about the reliability and journalistic ethics of news outlets,” NewsGuard said in response the Consortium lawsuit.

NewsGuard also said that the government contract, which has ended, was not for its rating of news publishers, but a “fingerprints data” service that tracks false narratives being spread online by foreign governments.

Nevertheless, last year, amid GOP attacks on efforts to root out misinformation, a provision was placed into the defense funding bill that singles out NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, placing restrictions on using their data when it comes to recruitment advertising. A similar provision was placed in this year’s bill. But Brill has said that NewsGuard does not have, and never has had, any advertising contracts with the U.S. government “in the first place.”

Carr has cited reports from Media Research Center’s NewsBusters, a media watchdog on the right that conducting an analysis of NewsGuard ratings that concluded that it “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” But Crovitz has disputed the findings as a small sample of the more than 10,000 sites it has rated.

Whether NewsGuard has a political bias is also beside the point, as their critiques and ratings are protected by the Constitution, argue some free speech advocates, who also make another point: What poses a threat is when a government official uses the bully pulpit to threaten some sort of sanction.

Shortly after Carr’s attack on NewsGuard, Jacob Sullum, the senior editor at the libertarian site Reason, argued that the company would be protected by the First Amendment even if it “were systematically biased against conservative voices. But there is little evidence to support that claim.”

“It is certainly true that fact-checkers and news media analysts are fallible and may be biased, and there is no shortage of complaints about specific calls that NewsGuard has made,” Sullum wrote. “But the crucial difference between a business like NewsGuard and the government is that only the latter has the power to coerce compliance. People are free to evaluate NewsGuard’s judgments, accept or reject them, and act accordingly.”

The offices of Carr and Ferguson did not respond to requests for comment.

Antitrust experts also are skeptical of Ferguson’s suggestion that NewsGuard has legal exposure when it comes to antitrust law. NewsGuard itself has challenged the notion that Newsmax has been the victim of an ad boycott, pointing to an investor presentation show advertising revenue is projected to grow by 228% since 2020.

Bill Kovacic, professor of law at Georgetown University and director of the Competition Law Center, said that the difficulty in proving a “conspiracy among rivals” antitrust case would be that NewsGuard was “coordinating an effort among the advertisers not to deal with” certain sites, and then to show that those advertisers “are agreeing among each other.”

“The antitrust framework would be to show that NewsGuard is orchestrating a collective effort not to deal with conservative sites. It is that collective effort that is the hard part,” Kovacic said.

The challenge would be to prove that NewsGuard is “engaging advertisers as a group to take a certain path.”

NewsGuard’s Brill and Crovitz said that they are doing no such thing.

Brill said, “We’re not a licensee of the FCC. They have zero jurisdiction. If they had jurisdiction, what they would be purporting to penalize us for is for doing journalism. It’s like saying I am going to penalize Consumer Reports because it’s giving people information when they are looking to buy a toaster.”

He added that when it comes to brands, “We’re not telling them what to do, but to the extent that we are telling anyone what to do, we’re telling them to read our journalism so they can learn more about the reliability of news and information websites.”