Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Trump last week in “recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.” The Nobel Committee later stated that the medal can be transferred, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot. Our analysts rated media coverage of Trump accepting the medal in our Topic of the Week.

Reporting from Newsweek and NewsNation received the highest reliability and lowest bias scores from our content set. The article on the NewsNation website focuses on the White House meeting between Machado and Trump, as well as gives an update on the situation in Venezuela since the U.S. captured then-President Nicolas Maduro in a military raid.

The Newsweek article focuses on the reaction from the Nobel Foundation, which stressed that the prize cannot be transferred, even symbolically. It details Trump’s previous efforts to win the peace prize and explains why he did not put Machado in power in Venezuela after Maduro’s capture. Instead, he installed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as interim president. Analysts found both articles to be a “mix of fact reporting and analysis,” with a “balanced” bias. 

A video from Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” show was categorized by our team as “opinion” with a “skews right” bias. The video features “Fox & Friends Weekend” host Rachel Campos-Duffy, who interviewed Machado after her meeting with Trump. Machado said she appreciated what Trump did for the Venezuelan people and said she gave him the medal “because he deserves it.” Campos-Duffy calls Trump “the new liberator of the Americas” and says Machado also gave Trump a rosary that was blessed recently by Pope Leo, saying it was an “emotional moment” and was “amazing.”

A video from the MS Now weekend program “Velshi” and an article from The Daily Beast were also rated as “opinion,” but with a “strong left” bias. The article’s name-calling begins in the headline: “Top Trump Goon Slams Nobel Foundation for Pointing Out Facts.” The Daily Beast criticizes White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung, who accused the Nobel Committee on X of “trying to play politics” for releasing statements that the Nobel Prize could not be transferred. Analysts noted that the article seems to mock Trump, stating that he “gleefully accepted the second-hand award, which Machado had mounted in a gold frame to add to Trump’s shiny Oval Office haul.”

In the MS Now video, host Ali Velshi begins by saying that if receiving the peace prize, even secondhand, will ”stop the entitled baby in the White House from prattling on about what a peacemaker he is, just give it to him.“ He describes Machado presenting her prize to Trump as a “suck-up,” and says that to Trump, it doesn’t matter if he earned the prize; it only matters that he has one. Velshi says the U.S. has bombed seven countries in the past year, and that “doesn’t traditionally qualify you for a peace prize.” Trump claims to have ended eight and a quarter wars, but “Donald Trump is a man who doesn’t so much achieve peace as declare it,” Velshi says. When assigning the bias and reliability scores, analysts noted Velshi’s criticism of Trump and his actions that he says make him less worthy of the prize, as well as his doubt about the validity of the prize at all.

The lowest-rated coverage from our content set came from the American Thinker. The article derides the Nobel committee for announcing that the prize is not transferable, saying it was “none of their business” if Machado chose to give her prize to Trump, an act that the article calls “an impressive gesture.” The article quotes the Nobel committee’s website, which states that a Nobel laureate may “give away, sell, or donate” the prize with no restrictions. “They didn’t even know their own rules, they just hated Trump and didn’t want him to have it,” the article states. Analysts noted that the official statement from the Nobel committee says the title was nontransferable, not the medal itself. They found the article to be “opinion” with a “strong right” bias.

Want to see if you agree with our analysis? New Topics of the Week are posted on the website each Monday. Read the articles and watch the videos yourself, then come back on Wednesday to compare your scores with those of our analysts. Learn more here.