Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was voted out of power last week in the U.S. House of Representatives, and media coverage of this unprecedented event was everywhere. Ad Fontes Media analysts rated articles from sources across the political spectrum in our Advanced Topic of the Week.

Each week, Ad Fontes Media chooses a widely covered trending news topic to share insight into how our analysts rank news coverage for the Media Bias Chart®. To do this, we select six articles reporting on the same story from different outlets to show how each treated the subject. 

Once we choose a set of articles, pods of analysts with diverse political perspectives (one right leaning, one center, and one left leaning) read each article and use Ad Fontes Media’s content analysis methodology to determine its bias and reliability. These ratings inform the articles’ placement on that week’s special Media Bias Chart.

This week, our analysts dove into a sextet of articles looking at different takes on the House vote to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Speaker “presides over debate, appoints members of select and conference committees, establishes the legislative agenda, maintains order within the House, and administers the oath of office to House members.” Without a Speaker of the House, there is no legislative agenda, halting work like passing a federal budget (the stopgap measure expires on Nov. 15) and aid for Ukraine and Israel.

The six articles were:

• “House ousts Kevin McCarthy as speaker in historic vote” from Axios; 
• “Vote to oust McCarthy is a warning sign for democracy, scholars say” from The Washington Post; 
• “Democrats Are Shocked to Encounter the Consequences of Their Own Actions” from National Review; 
• “Kevin McCarthy was a fawning servant to Trump, and he got nothing for it” from MSNBC; 
• “Congress Is in Its Eviction Era. I’m Loving Every Salty Moment.” from Slate; and 
• “McCarthy Ouster: Humiliation For The Uniparty Or Own Goal?” from American Greatness.

The bias and reliability scores for each of these can be found on our Topic of the Week page, but for now, we will focus on the final two articles.

The Slate article received a -16 for bias, giving it a strong left lean, and a 24 for reliability, placing it at the bottom of the opinion/wide variation in reliability category. This matches the overall source scores on the Ad Fontes Media source page for Slate: in the strong left category of bias and as opinion/wide variation in terms of reliability. 

The article’s subheading captures the tone of the story nicely: “Admit it: The pettiness is kinda entertaining” equates Washington, D.C., with “soul-crushing gridlock.” The article says of last week’s events, “Kevin McCarthy, a man whose political career is singular proof that karma is real, has been stripped of his gavel by the unseemly fringes of his truculent GOP.” 

Our analysts gave it a strong left bias for its vindictiveness and its snide criticism of the right, and its low reliability for its insults, asides, and sarcasm. These can both be encapsulated in this passage “We’re living in the age of the impasse. The constriction of MAGA hyperparity has made any substantial nation-altering projects untenable by design, and in that environment, our lawmakers must turn to increasingly arcane regions of the rulebook to ‘do politics’ on the most vicious, schoolyard scale.” 

The American Greatness article received a 20 for bias, placing it in the hyper-partisan right category, and a 13 for reliability, in the middle of the contains misleading info category. This just slightly diverges from the overall source scores on the Ad Fontes Media source page for American Greatness: in the hyper-partisan right category of bias and as selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda in terms of reliability. 

The subheading of this story is quite a bit more blunt: “All that really matters is ensuring that Biden goes down in defeat.” The story quickly takes a turn away from the “McCarthy Ouster” of the title and into vilifying the left (“These are people who would throw their mothers off a cliff if it meant the good of their party”) while lamenting Trump’s woes. 

The article poses several vitriolic statements about the current state of affairs (“The economy is in shambles, the invasion at the border is grabbing headlines, and voters are beginning to realize Biden is senile and up to his knees in corruption”) and the future: (Democrats don’t have much to run on in 2024, besides screaming about abortion and drumming up a bugbear of ‘extremists’ on the right who can’t govern.) Our analysts recognized this as a far-right propaganda piece, and compared with the other articles in this week’s set, it is difficult to see it as anything but. 

As always, we welcome you to take a look at the scores that our analysts gave to each article in the set and compare your own ratings. How much bias did you find in each article? How reliable did you find their content? Take a look and check back next week for another deep dive into the Topic of the Week.

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Sara Webb is a cybersecurity consultant and former high school librarian from Philadelphia, PA. She holds an M.S. in Informatics and an M. Ed in School Library and Information Technology, and has been a media literacy educator for over a decade. Sara started with Ad Fontes Media in July 2020 as a Media Analyst, and she currently continues in that role and as in-house Media Literacy Specialist. When not engrossed in media literacy projects, Sara can be found at the barn with her ex-racehorse Homer, or training her corgis for dog agility competitions.