Consortium News Sues NewsGuard, U.S. Government over Censorship Collaboration

Consortium News, a news website focused on foreign policy founded by an award-winning journalist who helped break the Iran-Contra story in the 1980s, is suing NewsGuard and the U.S. government over alleged collaboration to suppress its reporting, which is critical of U.S. foreign policy.

The complaint, filed in federal court, focuses on NewsGuard’s relationship with the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. In 2021, the Pentagon contracted NewsGuard to develop a system called “misinformation fingerprints” to catalogue “known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”

The complaint alleges that the U.S. government worked with NewsGuard to target and suppress Consortium’s reporting, which frequently takes a critical stance on U.S. foreign policy towards Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East.

Consortium alleges that through its contract with the Pentagon, NewsGuard was “acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints,” engaging in the “censorship and repression of views.”