This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped.

When veteran newsmen L. Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill started their news site rating company, they were prepared for the inevitable cries of bias from both sides.

What they didn’t anticipate was that NewsGuard, their company of about 50 employees, would become the target of congressional investigations and accusations from federal regulators that it was at the vanguard of a vast conspiracy to censor conservative views.

Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers — backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating.

Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a Republican, and Brill, a left-tending independent who founded Court TV and the American Lawyer magazine, engaged with publishers wanting to understand subpar ratings, sometimes wrangling for hours by phone over the details of a site’s correction policy.

But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”

NewsGuard, backed by legal experts, argues that Carr’s letter may violate the First Amendment by threatening the speech rights of private companies.

“The only attempt to censor going on here is by Brendan Carr,” Crovitz said in an interview.

At a time when social media, podcasts and partisan outlets are displacing the mainstream media as news sources, the battle over NewsGuard’s future is symptomatic of a broader societal struggle over who gets to arbitrate the truth. And Carr’s letter potentially heralds a Trump administration prepared to wield state power to win that battle.

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When NewsGuard launched, fighting disinformation was still a bipartisan battle. Revelations the year before that Kremlin-backed operatives had manipulated American social networks to mislead and divide Americans had shaken Silicon Valley and troubled Republicans and Democrats alike. Tech executives such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were lambasted by lawmakers in testy televised hearings for their failure to fight fake news.

Despite the battering, tech giants didn’t particularly want to play truth police on their platforms. Crovitz and Brill offered them a solution: Pay NewsGuard to sift the real news sites from the propaganda peddlers.

“We’re going to apply common sense to a problem the algorithms haven’t been able to solve,” Brill told CBS Mornings that year. “It’s going to be very simple … telling the difference between the Denver Post and the Denver Guardian, which is a hoax site.”

Users of NewsGuard products — which include a free browser extension for Microsoft Edge and extensions you can buy for other major browsers — see each publisher’s credibility score beside any link to its articles in search results or on social media.

A recent Google search for “government shutdown,” with NewsGuard’s ratings enabled, turned up articles from Rolling Stone magazine, which scored 87.5 percent; NBC’s Austin affiliate, which scored 92.5%; and World Socialist Web Site, which scored 7.5%. Clicking on the rating for each brings up NewsGuard’s assessment of the site. (World Socialist Web Site, it warns, is a far-left, for-profit enterprise that has “published false claims about the Russia-Ukraine War.” Reached for comment, World Socialist Web Site spokesman Joseph Kishore said NewsGuard’s rating “is not based on objective assessment but political prejudice against our socialist perspective.”)

But if rating news sites seemed like a straightforward endeavor, navigating an increasingly fractured and partisan information landscape has turned out to be anything but.

NewsGuard landed a high-profile early client in Microsoft, which incorporated the company’s credibility ratings into its Edge browser. Google, Facebook, and other internet giants opted to use their own opaque algorithms to decide which sites and posts would rise to the top of users’ search results and feeds.

Brill and Crovitz found more demand among online advertisers and brand safety groups looking for tools to ensure their ads don’t run on scammy news sites or alongside bogus claims. While other such tools existed, including Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, NewsGuard stood out in the way that it publishes its assessments of media outlets.

In addition to its publisher credibility ratings, NewsGuard began tracking specific false narratives that it saw spreading across disreputable sites. Brill said NewsGuard keeps a “catalog of provably false claims” — not matters of opinion, such as “abortion is bad,” but definitively debunked factual claims such as “the moon landing didn’t happen.”

“There are advertisers that don’t want to advertise on a website that has articles saying that Dominion voting machines were rigged or the coronavirus vaccine will kill you,” Brill said in an interview.

Jason Kint, CEO of the publisher trade group Digital Content Next, said marketers need to assure brand safety. “Given the Wild West nature of the web, it’s important to have tools that can provide accurate data,” he said, to “avoid harm to the brand and weed out fraudulent and illegal sites.”

The rise of generative artificial intelligence has expanded the potential market for NewsGuard’s products. No major AI company wants its flagship chatbot parroting falsehoods it found on fake news sites. Brill and Crovitz declined to say which ones they’re working with other than Microsoft.

Six years after its launch, NewsGuard has attained what Brill called “sustainable profitability.” But he and Crovitz no longer enjoy friendly bipartisan audiences in Washington.

Instead, they find themselves a central target of Republicans’ wide-ranging war on content moderation — a practice many on the right deem censorship — with their reputation and their business at stake.

During his first term, Trump routinely clashed with the mainstream media and social networks over their attempts to fact-check his statements, especially when he began contesting the 2020 election as fraudulent. After the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the major social networks banned or indefinitely suspended Trump, earning his ire and stoking suspicion on the right that online content moderation was fundamentally a liberal plot to muzzle disfavored views.

That sense helped to motivate Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 and intensified with the publication of the “Twitter Files,” a series of tweets by a group of journalists Musk handpicked to comb through internal Twitter documents for evidence of overzealous content moderation and anti-conservative bias. Among the documents was a 2021 pitch to Twitter executives by NewsGuard, which Twitter Files coauthor Lee Fang called “an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests.”

When Republicans took control of the House in 2023, newly installed committee chairmen including Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) of the Judiciary Committee, James Comer (R., Ky.) of the Oversight Committee and Roger Williams (R., Texas) of the Small Business Committee launched investigations into what they deemed censorship of Americans’ views. Their targets included Big Tech companies, the Biden administration, misinformation researchers — and NewsGuard.

Williams’s Small Business Committee produced a 66-page report in September on what it called the “censorship-industrial complex,” which criticized the State Department and Defense Department for awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to NewsGuard. The report found that NewsGuard selects “winners and losers in the news media space” through its ratings and products for advertisers. It accused the company of bias for, among other things, giving high ratings to mainstream outlets such as the Associated Press and NPR that ran what the report deemed misleading headlines about Donald Trump’s comments on the 2024 campaign trail.

Since Trump’s election victory, some of his picks for top regulatory positions have made tackling online “censorship” a priority and cast NewsGuard as an emblem of the problem. His pick to succeed trustbuster Lina Khan as Federal Trade Commission chair, Andrew Ferguson, wrote in a December filing that he would support using antitrust laws to break up censorship “cartels,” mentioning NewsGuard by name.

Carr’s letter last month accused the tech executives of participating in “a censorship cartel that included not only technology and social media companies but advertising, marketing, and so-called ‘fact-checking’ organizations as well as the Biden-Harris Administration itself.” In mentioning that the tech industry’s prized liability shield, Section 230, only applies when they operate “in good faith,” Carr suggested that working with NewsGuard might be putting that protection at risk.

NewsGuard has also been targeted by conservative regulators over its grants from the Pentagon to track disinformation efforts by Russia, China, and Iran targeting Americans and U.S. allies.

Crovitz and Brill said they fought off an attempt by Congress last year to add a restriction to a key defense funding bill that would have barred the Pentagon from using NewsGuard. They believe that effort and Carr’s letter followed inaccurate reporting about its work by right-leaning publisher Newsmax, which had expressed dissatisfaction with its low ratings from NewsGuard.

NewsGuard replied to Carr in a Dec. 10 letter, saying his letter cited factual errors about its work that had been reported by Newsmax. The claim that advertising firms use NewsGuard to censor conservative views, for instance, is belied by more conservative outlets being rated as credible than liberal ones, NewsGuard said.

Carr was also wrong about the companies that use its products, the company said. Of the four companies Carr wrote to — Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google — only Microsoft has publicly acknowledged working with NewsGuard, though it declined to comment on that work for this article. Meta and Google told the Washington Post they do not use NewsGuard’s products.

Apple did not respond to requests for comment, and NewsGuard declined to say whether it works with Apple, citing a policy against discussing whether it works with specific companies unless those companies publicly disclose the relationship.

Reached by email, Carr said he had heard back from all four companies and had never assumed that all of them had ties to NewsGuard. “I wanted confirmation from the ones that I did not think worked with NewsGuard that they don’t actually work with NewsGuard,” he wrote. He said NewsGuard is purposely withholding information about its business.

“Suffice to say that NewsGuard’s response and its conduct since I raised these issues a few weeks back has only heightened and underscored my concerns,” he said. “NewsGuard’s response is a jumble of disinformation, deception and sleight of hand. In other words, it mirrors NewsGuard’s business model, in my opinion.”

Carr has not responded to NewsGuard’s request for a meeting, Crovitz said, “apparently preferring to continue to rely on falsehoods to censor us.” Brill said people on the Hill, whom he declined to name, told him Newsmax has been driving the Republican campaign against NewsGuard, offering legislators and regulators airtime whenever they criticize or take action against the company.

Reached via email, Newsmax chief executive Chris Ruddy called Brill “a longtime Democratic Party activist” and said: “Brill is free to make up any ratings he wants, but any business or ad agency that uses them is clearly taking political sides.

The kind of public pressure NewsGuard faces is making news a perilous environment for advertisers and their clients, industry insiders say.

“All of those companies have business with the government,” said one former ad executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for retribution by the Trump administration. “Nobody’s going to want to risk their ire. … What marketers will end up doing is avoiding news entirely.”

Musk, who has called NewsGuard “a propaganda shop that will produce any lies you want if you pay them enough money,” has already achieved that chilling effect. In August, his social media company X filed a lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an industry coalition that develops brand safety guidelines, accusing the group of violating antitrust laws. Days later, GARM, which was led by the World Federation of Advertisers, shut down.

In October, another industry effort to encourage advertisers to buy ads on credible news outlets collapsed after one of the agencies involved got a letter from Jordan alleging their work could be illegal.

Some First Amendment experts say Carr leaning on tech companies to distance themselves from NewsGuard is closer to censorship than anything NewsGuard does.

Offering opinions as to news sites’ credibility, as NewsGuard does, “is emphatically speech,” said Ari Cohn, senior tech policy counsel at the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

“For Carr to write to the platforms and basically threaten them that if they utilize this protected expression he’s going to go after them is just First Amendment problem upon First Amendment problem,” Cohn said.

The irony, he added, is that it comes after four years in which Republican leaders criticized and even sued the Biden administration over allegations of “jawboning,” or applying undue government pressure to private entities to suppress speech. That’s exactly what Carr is doing now, Cohn argued.

Brill said the pressure from the right hasn’t cost the company any clients that he is aware of, but it has taken a toll on the company in other ways. Instead of focusing full-time on its misinformation research and news ratings, it has had to spend money on legal fees and time and energy explaining and defending its practices to politicians, clients and the public.

Crovitz had a more personal complaint about the criticism he has received from some fellow Republicans. “They refer to me as a liberal,” he said, “which I find to be slander.”