mega merger of advertising giants Omnicom and Interpublic It’ll face more regulatory scrutiny than you think — and On the Money has learned that a major hurdle is woke capitalism.
Donald Trump isn’t even in the White House yet, but the left in corporate America is already nervous — and rightfully so. For example, Paramount needs approval to merge with Hollywood studio Skydance, but as I reported for The Post earlier this week, its left-leaning network CBS may be violated Fairness provisions of the Federal Communications Commission.
I am told that this is in accordance with Brendan Carr, top cop coming to FCCWhich would enforce this order of how local TV stations operate over the public airwaves (as opposed to cable). Carr believes the way CBS covered the 2024 presidential election is evidence of its lack of “impartiality” – as in providing both sides in any political debate, my sources tell me. Let us tell.
Similarly, ad agencies like Omnicom and Interpublic may face similar heat when they seek approval for their $25 billion merger when Trump regulators take over next year. A major issue is the agencies’ reliance on so-called news rating services that rank outlets based on whether they allegedly sell inappropriate content such as misinformation.
Critics claim that these ratings are based less on actual misinformation and more on leftist groupthink. My DC sources say advertising dollars then skew largely toward leftist news sites and networks, which brings us to the antitrust angle (which I’ll talk about later) that could impact the Omnicom-Interpublic deal. Could.
Many news organizations deemed safe by these services were outlets that were labeled as misinformation The Post’s absolutely true Hunter Biden laptop story. Plus, it’s no secret that Madison Avenue is notoriously crowded.
That’s why conservative activists say ad agencies and corporate advertising departments seek political and regulatory cover by avoiding news sites outside the progressive ecosystem of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS. They will pay for rating services from organizations like newsguard Critics accuse it of justifying the funding of conservative media.
In particular, I’m told, the Trump Antitrust Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the FCC will likely investigate the Omnicom-Interpublic tie-up and demand answers about the agencies’ use of ratings services. Antitrust lawyers say a case can be made if you can prove that raters made some deal to lower their grades to appease leftists in the advertising business.
“There has been case law that if you essentially engage in a group boycott that could violate antitrust laws,” said a D.C.-based antitrust lawyer with ties to the incoming Trump administration. “It appears that all of these ad rating companies give lower ratings to conservative news sites, and ad agencies are known to employ leftists who would prefer to direct their business away from conservative media.”
Congress has heard on this rating business And that’s likely to happen again, I’m told. Some people are already predicting that Trump’s people will block the Omnicom-Interpublic deal because of these woke advertising issues. Chris Ruddy, founder of the conservative site Newsmax, who has a table at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, told On the Money: “I can tell you that if these companies relied on these ratings services it would The deal won’t happen.”
People at the ratings companies say all they are doing is providing a service to protect corporate clients who don’t want to be associated with fake news, or divert advertising dollars away from bot farms on social media. want. And to be fair, I haven’t seen any direct evidence to show that undisclosed deals have been made to punish right-wing news organizations.
In a statement, NewsGuard told me that its ratings are “based on nine non-political journalism criteria using a transparent process with multiple layers of review and fact-checking. As a result of this non-partisan and rigorous approach, NewsGuard’s The database has more conservative sites with an overall ‘trusted’ rating than liberal sites.
NewsGuard stated that “Many conservative sites outperform similar left-leaning brands – for example, FoxNews.com outperforms MSNBC.com, The Daily Caller outperforms The Daily Kos, The Washington Examiner Beats The New York Times, and The National Review beats Mother Jones. The Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute.
NewsGuard CEO Gordon Crovitz told me in an interview that any grade above 60 is on the company’s “inclusion list” for advertisers and others who use the service. “Fox News and the NY Post benefit from our ratings,” he said.
But On the Money reviewed the rankings and found some strange results. For example, the New York Post received a 69.5 rating out of 100 from NewsGuard, which criticized The Post for pushing “attention-grabbing headlines and gossip” and “false and misleading claims about politics.”
Newsmax got a 20 out of 100, even though its website mostly runs wire copies from Reuters and the AP, people there tell me. The Federalist, respected in right-wing political circles, scored 12.5 points. Fox News received a 69.5 rating because it “generally maintains basic standards of credibility and transparency – with significant exceptions.”
In contrast, The New York Times – which for years delivered a steady dose of fake Trump-Russian collusion news, received a perfect score of 100 out of 100. That is, until last February, when its rating dropped to a still-strong 87.5. The Washington Post, which is literally irritating readers with its leftist bias and credibility problems, also got a perfect 100.
Al Jazeera English, which receives funding from the government of Qatar and has been credibly accused of anti-Israel bias in the war against Hamas, received 82.5 because it “mostly adheres to basic standards of credibility and transparency.”
So stay tuned.
