Opinion | Trump’s Fcc And Ftc Chairs Say I Run A Censorship ‘cartel.’ Here’s The Truth.

Last week, The Washington Post published an article detailing how NewsGuard, whose journalists rate the reliability of news sources, has become the target of incoming Trump administration regulators and far-right Republicans in Congress. They are accusing me and my NewsGuard colleagues of being part of some left-wing conspiracy — or “cartel” in the words of the incoming chairs of both the FCC and the FTC. Our cartel is supposedly aimed at censoring conservative websites and their associated social media and video platforms.

What we actually do is provide consumers and businesses with our journalists’ assessments of the professional standards of thousands of news websites, assigning them reliability scores based on apolitical, journalistic factors — like accuracy, transparent correction policies and honest headlines. Advertisers, for example, can use these reliability scores to make sure their computerized placements of online ads avoid running alongside Russian disinformation, health care hoaxes or other content that could embarrass their brands. Consumers who subscribe to our browser extension can also see those ratings when they pull up an article or scroll through a Facebook or X feed.

If you click the link to the Post article, you’ll see that the reporters compiled a chart of our 0-100 point ratings for a sample of 20 news sites. It plainly demonstrates that we give high and low ratings to liberal and conservative sites alike, because the nine criteria we use to tally the point score have nothing to do with politics. After all, is there a liberal or conservative way to have a transparent policy for admitting and correcting errors or having headlines that accurately reflect what’s delivered in the story?

One of our other criteria is whether the website repeatedly publishes provably false or egregiously misleading stories. Thus, the incoming FCC chair, Brendan Carr, accused the “Orwellian named NewsGuard” of “billing itself as the Internet arbiter of truth.”

Lately, it’s become a cliché of sorts that there can be no “arbiter of truth” — that no one can claim to know or declare what is true. Well, that’s wrong. That is what journalists, when they are doing their jobs professionally, are supposed to do.

There is a “true” answer to whether Hank Aaron died from a Covid vaccine. He didn’t. That’s a fact, not an opinion. So, NewsGuard took points off the ratings of health care hoax sites that falsely reported that the baseball great died from the vaccine. There is a true answer to whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used U.S. funds to send his wife off on a Cartier shopping spree. He didn’t. (A Russian disinformation network spread that story.) There is a true answer to whether the Republicans’ Project 2025 called for cuts in Social Security. It didn’t, even though Kamala Harris gave campaign speeches declaring that it did.

Of course, it was gratifying to see the chart in the Post demonstrating that our work as “arbiters of truth” is apolitical.

But in another sense, I hated that chart. It literally kept me up the night after it was published.

I hated it because it was a necessary part of a story that in large part debunked the incoming regulators’ charge that we are political hacks who need to be curbed. We urged the Post reporters to review for themselves whether our ratings leaned one way or the other based on politics. But the fact that we had to make that defense to respond to the incoming officials’ accusations and threats — which were the impetus for the Post story — is what made me sleepless.

Journalists should always be prepared and eager to defend their work to their readers. But not to the government. Not in America.

We are accountable to our readers and to those we write about for keeping our promise to be apolitical and fair. We think NewsGuard meets that accountability standard. We are completely transparent in how we have rated over 10,000 publishers around the world. We always seek comment from a publisher before we publish even the slightest negative comment. We investigate any complaints about our work, and we candidly correct any mistakes we make.

If we fail to meet that standard of accountability and fairness, our business will — and should — fail. Competitors could take our place. Publishers to whom we have given low ratings could prove us wrong and discredit us. Users of our data could decide they don’t want the input of third-party companies like ours that purport to inform them about which sources are reliable.

But in this country, the one audience journalists should never have to defend themselves to is a group of government regulators. It is, or should be, a core value binding us as Americans. Beyond narrow exceptions, such as those related to national security, the government should have no role in judging content, let alone attempting to chill or block it.

The First Amendment means the government has no power to censor, whether it’s our work or the work of political hacks on the left or right posing as journalists. I may not have a right to defame someone, but that’s up to a jury to decide, not some regulator taking orders from an aggrieved political faction. Just as it’s up to readers to decide whether to believe in and support my journalism and up to me to earn that trust.

What I should not have to do is write a letter, as my partner Gordon Crovitz and I recently did, pleading our case to the incoming chair of the FCC who (having zero jurisdiction, by the way) has threatened to take action against NewsGuard. We explained how unbiased we are. How Gordon is a longtime Federalist Society conservative and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who wrote editorials for its notoriously conservative opinion page. And how I am a journalist who, while having written books and articles critical of liberal targets like the health care and gun industries, has also written critical books and articles about conservative targets like the Teamsters and teachers unions.

I felt like taking a shower after trying to defend my journalism to a threatening regulator, pleading with him to believe that I’m fair. The merits of that argument should not have mattered, and making the argument felt like a concession to an important principle that would give our inquisitors encouragement to harass others.

Last year, we got a letter from a Republican-led congressional committee demanding voluminous documents as part of an investigation of NewsGuard that the committee was launching. One of our lawyers — the Republican legal icon and recently deceased Ted Olson — advised us to tell the committee to pound sand, that they had no jurisdiction. Ted’s advice was not to “feed the shark and hope it goes away.” He said, “I do not think that this committee is entitled to an explanation of how or why NewsGuard conducts its affairs. We should make a stand and stick to it.” Instead, we complied with the information requests, accompanied by a long cover letter pleading our case for how apolitical we were.

That investigation was inspired by OANN, a far-right website and television channel, which apparently cannot stand the fact that its rating is 44.5 points lower than its rival, Fox News. After urging the committee to investigate NewsGuard, OANN, of course, featured an exclusive on-air interview with the committee chair announcing the investigation.

OANN and Newsmax, another low-rated, far-right news site that has also encouraged these investigations, have repeatedly referred to me as a “longtime Democratic activist” or “operative.” So, I found myself on a Zoom call last year with the committee staff explaining that the only politician I had every worked for was a Republican mayor of New York, when I was a law student. I even heard myself telling the staff that as publisher of The American Lawyer in the ’90s I ran the first story that touted the validity of the Paula Jones sexual harassment case against President Bill Clinton, which ultimately launched the Clinton impeachment investigation related to his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

A part of me hated myself for that groveling defense. I have a right to do journalism without government apparatchiks grilling me about my work under the threat of a prolonged, expensive investigation.

Newsmax and OANN have the right to criticize NewsGuard, and they exercise that right vehemently. What they should not be able to do is enlist our government to help them. And no government official who takes the oath of office has the right to join them.

Maybe we should have had the courage of Ted Olson’s convictions.