South Carolina's state budget for fiscal year 2026-2027 includes a provision lifted from Senate Bill 1094 — the "First Amendment Preservation Act" — that bans state agencies from contracting with any advertising firm that uses "media reliability and bias monitors" to decide where ad dollars go. The provision was introduced by Senators Garrett, Corbin, Kennedy, and Kimbrell, and it does something no one in the censorship-industrial complex expected a state legislature to do: follow the money.
It cuts it off.
The bill defines a "media reliability and bias monitor" as any entity whose primary function involves "rating or ranking news and information sources for the factual accuracy of their content" or providing ratings based on "misinformation, bias, adherence to journalistic standards, or ethics."
Here's how the racket worked. Advertising agencies used these ratings to steer programmatic ad buys away from outlets flagged as unreliable. Conservative media outlets watched their ad revenue crater while legacy outlets with documented track records of getting stories wrong kept cashing checks. The monitors didn't need government authority. They just needed corporate compliance. And they got it.
S. 1094 attacks the problem at the contract level. Any company bidding on a state advertising or marketing contract must now provide written certification that it neither operates as a media reliability monitor nor uses the services of one for ad placement decisions. No certification, no contract. No workarounds, no waivers.
The provision mirrors efforts in other red states. Florida inserted similar language into its 2026 budget, explicitly naming NewsGuard, Ad Fontes Media, and the Global Disinformation Index as entities state agencies cannot fund through advertising contracts.
NewsGuard has positioned itself as a neutral arbiter of journalistic standards. Which is an interesting claim for an organization that rated the New York Times and Washington Post as highly credible during the years both outlets pushed the Steele dossier, suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, and ran interference on COVID lab-leak reporting. The monitors graded on ideology and called it methodology.
Critics of these state-level bans argue they could reduce "quality control" in government advertising. Which assumes that outsourcing editorial judgment to a private company with a documented political lean constitutes quality control. South Carolina's legislature looked at that argument and decided it constitutes something else entirely — using public money to subsidize viewpoint discrimination.
An industry that spent years quietly deciding which media outlets deserved to exist just lost its first revenue stream from a state that decided to read the receipts.