Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wants to "dismantle" what he calls "the censorship cartel." As Carr defines it, that cartel includes not just Big Tech companies such as Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet (which owns Google) but also NewsGuard, a company that rates the credibility and transparency of news and information sources. Carr says NewsGuard has conspired with other businesses to "violate Americans' constitutional freedoms" by silencing "news outlets and organizations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative."
Carr's complaint is puzzling for several reasons. First, his claim that NewsGuard is violating "Americans' constitutional freedoms" is legally nonsensical, since the First Amendment constrains government action, not the decisions of private businesses. Second, the First Amendment protects NewsGuard's commercial activities, which include researching news outlets, evaluating them, offering guidance to advertisers, and selling filters based on its credibility assessments. Third, Carr's implicit charge that NewsGuard is biased against conservatives, which echoes complaints from Republican members of Congress and organizations such as the Media Research Center (MRC), does not seem to have a firm empirical basis.
