The Washington Post gave outlets that buried the Hunter Biden laptop story perfect 100 out of 100 credibility scores.
Now Florida just made it illegal to spend your tax dollars on the people who handed out those scores.
And what DeSantis signed last week is the opening shot in a war that's already spreading to every corner of the country.
The Racket That Ran for Years Unchecked
NewsGuard called itself a neutral media referee.
It wasn't.
The Media Research Center ran the numbers: left-leaning outlets averaged 91 out of 100 on NewsGuard's credibility scale.
Right-leaning outlets averaged 65.
That's a 26-point gap – and the gap has been getting worse, not better, with every new MRC study.
Planned Parenthood got a 75.
Pro-life outlet Live Action got a 17.5.
Communist Chinese state propaganda arms like China Daily and Global Times scored between 39 and 45.
The Federalist, Newsmax, and One America News scored lower than Beijing's mouthpieces.
The mechanism was simple and brutal: low score on NewsGuard's nutrition label, and major brands' ad budgets got routed away from your outlet automatically.
No appeal.
No transparency.
No recourse.
And the money behind NewsGuard?
A $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.
Your tax dollars funded the machine that was quietly draining conservative media of revenue.
Florida Said No – Twice
DeSantis signed the anti-blacklist provision into the FY 2026–27 budget last week, making it the second straight year Florida lawmakers have included the language.
State agencies are now barred from contracting with advertising firms that use media reliability and bias monitoring services – which means NewsGuard, Ad Fontes Media, and the Global Disinformation Index are effectively shut out of Florida's advertising contracts.
"Taxpayer-funded advertising should maximize public reach – not be filtered through ideological gatekeepers masquerading as neutral watchdogs," said IMC spokeswoman Christine Czernejewski.
https://twitter.com/azattelevision/status/2072794028211314989?s=20
That's exactly right.
The entire premise of these blacklist operations was that government and corporate money should flow to outlets deemed ideologically acceptable by a small group of politically connected people in New York and Washington.
Florida just said that's not how the people's money works.
The Movement Has Already Gone National
What DeSantis started is no longer just a Florida story.
West Virginia passed its own First Amendment Preservation Act this year, targeting the same viewpoint-based discrimination.
Eight states – Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Utah, Texas, and West Virginia – joined the FTC's April 2026 action against the ad agencies running the blacklist system.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson forced three major advertising agencies to sign a consent order prohibiting them from steering ad dollars based on a news outlet's political viewpoint.
The world's largest advertising firm, created by the merger of Omnicom and the Interpublic Group, was barred as a condition of merger approval from doing business with NewsGuard at all.
That's not a fine.
That's not a warning letter.
That's the federal government telling the biggest ad buyer on earth that it cannot work with the people who built the blacklist.
https://twitter.com/DailyMarcher/status/2025841481710440751?s=20
Congress added similar anti-blacklist language to the National Defense Authorization Act, cutting off the Pentagon's ability to fund these operations.
The Trump Administration had already abolished the Global Engagement Center – the State Department office that was funneling money to these censorship outfits in the first place.
Why This Matters Beyond Politics
These rating agencies didn't just hurt conservative outlets.
They set up a system where a small group of people in New York could decide which ideas deserved to survive in the marketplace and which ones deserved to be quietly strangled.
When NewsGuard's co-CEO Steven Brill went on CNBC right before the 2020 election to call the Hunter Biden laptop story a probable Russian "hoax," he wasn't acting as a neutral fact-checker.
He was a political operative with a scoring system that could cut off advertising revenue to any outlet that covered the story accurately.
That's the racket DeSantis just put a stake through in Florida.
They built it in secret.
They're losing it in public.
Sources:
- Robert B. Bluey, "Florida Just Showed Us How to Fight Back Against Media Blacklists," The Daily Signal, July 7, 2026.
- "DeSantis Signs Anti-Censorship Law for Second Straight Year," Newsmax, July 2, 2026.
- "Florida Lawmakers Pass Law Targeting Media Blacklists," The Daily Signal, June 4, 2026.
- "FTC Takes Action to Restore Competition in the Digital Advertising Ecosystem," Federal Trade Commission, April 16, 2026.
- "FTC Moves To Bar 'Brand Safety' Advertising Scheme Used To Censor Conservative Media," The Daily Caller, April 15, 2026.
- "Study Finds NewsGuard Overtly Biased Against Conservatives," The Federalist, December 13, 2023.
- "Inquiry Launched into Alleged Left-Wing Bias of News-Rating Group," The Washington Stand, June 17, 2024.
