Federal Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit Against NewsGuard
The self-styled watchdog site ranks news outlets' reliability, which has rankled those on both the right and left.
This week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against the U.S. government and an internet watchdog organization.
NewsGuard was founded by Gordon Crovitz, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill, an attorney who started Court TV; they serve as co-CEOs. The company employs journalists to assess and rate the reliability of news outlets on a scale of 0–100. The ratings—what it calls "nutrition reports"—are offered to advertisers and news aggregators but can also be displayed in search results for users who download NewsGuard's software.
Consortium News is an online news outlet founded in 1995 to counteract what its founder deemed the mainstream media's "pattern of groupthink on issue after issue" and "the silliness and propaganda that had come to pervade American journalism."
In 2022, NewsGuard assessed Consortium News' reliability and found it lacking: It rated the outlet 47.5/100 and said it "covers international politics from a left-wing, anti-U.S. perspective [and] has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war and other international conflicts."
"Proceed with caution," NewsGuard advised readers. "This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards." Anyone with a NewsGuard web browser extension would see a red flag attached to Consortium News links.
In posts on the site, Consortium News Editor in Chief Joe Lauria strenuously denied the accusations at length. "If CN were really an 'anti-U.S.' website it would be happy to let things in the U.S. run its course towards steep decline," he wrote in December 2022. "It would welcome rather than criticize foreign and domestic policy decisions by U.S. leaders that are harming the nation."
The following year, the Consortium for Independent Journalism (CIJ)—the nonprofit that publishes Consortium News—sued NewsGuard for defamation.
"NewsGuard has identified no 'false content' but disputes the opinion of five CN commentaries on matters concerning Ukraine and Syria and because of such dispute, NewsGuard has labelled all 20,000-plus CN articles and videos, while reviewing only five of them, as purveying 'false content' and failing to meet minimum journalistic standards," the lawsuit claimed. "By placing the red flag warning…appended to works that NewsGuard has not read, NewsGuard has acted to defame, libel and slander CN's entire production and its writers, recklessly and without regard to the truth."
In fairness, the articles NewsGuard did object to were doozies: "NewsGuard says Consortium News is publishing 'false content' because it has reported on a 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev and on the pervasive influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine," Lauria complained. "It objected to the word 'infested' to describe neo-Nazi presence in the Ukrainian government."
Still, no matter how "objective" NewsGuard claims to be, it's ultimately giving its opinion of a site's reliability based upon its output—a clear act of First Amendment–protected speech.
Other self-styled watchdogs seem to hold mixed views of Consortium News. Media Bias/Fact Check rates the site as having a "left bias" but notes it is "mostly factual" with "medium credibility." Ad Fontes Media, on the other hand, rates its bias "strong left" and finds it "unreliable" and "problematic." (As of this writing, Ad Fontes Media's most recently ranked Consortium News article is titled "Yes, Ukraine Started the War," which it ranked unreliable and biased toward the right.)
CIJ later amended its lawsuit, adding the U.S. government as a defendant and claiming a violation of its First Amendment rights. From NewsGuard, it sought $13.6 million in punitive damages, plus unspecified compensatory damages.
"In September 2021, the Department of Defense awarded NewsGuard a contract for its 'Misinformation Fingerprints' program in the amount of $749,387," per the amended complaint. As a result, "NewsGuard is paid to identify media organizations that provide information or reportage concerning Ukraine and Russia that is contrary to the viewpoints of the U.S., its intelligence agencies and U.S. allies."
In a reply brief, NewsGuard contended it "did not rate Consortium News pursuant to its government contract." In a March 2023 email to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, NewsGuard co-CEO Crovitz said, "Our work for the Pentagon's Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments."
Incidentally, as Reason's Robby Soave wrote in 2023, the U.S. government contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization that uses opaque methodology to list the news outlets most susceptible to disinformation in an attempt to dissuade advertisers; Reason was included on its list of the 10 "riskiest," along with right-wing outlets like The Federalist and The Daily Wire. (NewsGuard has given Reason a perfect score "for the highest adherence to journalistic practice.")
This week, Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York dismissed CIJ's lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.
"To be sure, this litigation raises several hot-button issues regarding the metes and bounds of the First Amendment, state action, and defamation," Failla wrote. "But however provocative they may appear at first glance, these issues fall comfortably within settled law."
Regarding the First Amendment claim, Failla wrote that CIJ's complaint "lacks sufficient allegations that the Government controlled NewsGuard's decision-making process and internal operations" and therefore "fails as a matter of law." Besides, she added, even if NewsGuard were a state actor and had acted as such, "Plaintiff has not sufficiently alleged a First Amendment violation."
As to the defamation claim, Failla wote, "the Court finds that the challenged statements are non-actionable expressions of opinion, which Plaintiff does not plausibly allege to be false. Moreover, even if the statements were otherwise actionable, Plaintiff does not sufficiently allege that NewsGuard made these statements with actual malice, as required for public figures like NewsGuard."
"We're grateful to the judge for finding what we always knew, which is that NewsGuard has a First Amendment right to provide ratings of websites and that as a private-sector journalistic company we have no state power or authority," Crovitz tells Reason in an emailed statement.
NewsGuard has come under fire for its work in recent years, though most prominently from the right. In June 2024, Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, "launched an investigation into the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns."
In November 2024, just days before President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would elevate Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Carr sent a letter to the CEOs of four major tech companies "to obtain information about your work with one specific organization—the Orwellian named NewsGuard." Carr later said NewsGuard "operates for the purpose of censoring viewpoints that fall outside an approved narrative." ("Contrary to claims made in the hearings, we oppose any government involvement in rating news sources, and we also oppose government censorship," Crovitz said in his email to Taibbi.) At the time, Reason's Jacob Sullum called Carr's campaign against NewsGuard "legally dubious and empirically shaky."
It's ironic, then, that in dismissing the lawsuit, Failla provided relief both to NewsGuard and to the government whose representatives have made NewsGuard a target of their own.
