Under a new law, Florida won’t be giving a dollar to anti-free speech groups seeking to silence disfavored media outlets by choking off their advertising revenue.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked organizations like media ratings firm NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index from receiving any state funds. This marked the latest blow to the left’s attempts to rate, stigmatize and drive away ad dollars from outlets that challenge them on COVID-19, transgenderism and other issues.
DeSantis signed Florida’s 2026 budget on June 30, which included a provision “prohibiting a state agency from using state funds to contract with an advertising agency or other contractor who acts as or uses the services of media reliability and bias monitors.”
The Media Research Center has repeatedly called out NewsGuard for its flagrant, biased ratings in favor of leftist and legacy media sources, as demonstrated in three successive MRC studies.
A December 2023 study demonstrated that NewsGuard gave a favorable average rating of 91 percent to publications on the left, while giving a relatively negative average rating of 65 percent to publications on the right. The other two studies showed that NewsGuard’s past behavior was just as bad, exposing 25- and 27-point gaps between ratings for left-leaning and right-leaning sources. MRC utilized media ratings from AllSides to determine media outlets' political leanings.
The Florida ban follows several other terrible developments for NewsGuard. A House Judiciary Committee report recently exposed the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM)—the now-defunct censorship pressure group by the World Advertiser Federation (WFA)—for targeting not just disfavored publications but also Elon Musk’s Twitter. GARM closed down in August 2024. NewsGuard can no longer exploit the massive collective power of WFA members—roughly 90 percent of global ad dollars—to strip dollars from outlets it doesn’t like.
Additionally, advertising giant Omnicom Group Inc. renounced “illegal collusion or coordination to direct advertising away from media publishers based on political or ideological viewpoints,” as a condition of a merger with fellow advertising giant IPG. The new largest advertising company in the world appears to have stepped away from NewsGuard’s approach.
In response to DeSantis’s move, Newsmax host Tom Basile told fellow host Robb Finnerty, “Every Republican governor in the country right now needs to take a page out of Ron DeSantis’s book.” Basile went on to describe how anti-free speech groups like NewsGuard operate:
“The left knows that they can't regulate conservative media or thought that they don't agree with out of existence. But what they can do is try to squeeze them financially using these patently biased rating systems and exclusion lists through the ad agencies as justification for advertisers not spending money on those platforms. It's actually pretty brilliant on the part of the left. It's a real confluence of sort of woke corporate agencies, the deep state and the leftist political ecosystem.”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
The DeSantis Photo was included in the article courtesy of the Executive Office of Governor Ron DeSantis.
