President Trump has announced that renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., is expected to be completed in time for the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. However, The Cultural Landscape Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the National Park Service to halt the project. Our analysts rated media coverage in our Topic of the Week.

An article on the Fox News website features photos of a sample test at the Reflecting Pool that were recently shared by President Trump. The article gives details about the work and the lawsuit, which alleges that proper legal procedures were not followed prior to the work beginning at the site, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. It ends with a White House spokeswoman’s quote that is negative about Presidents Obama and Biden. Analysts categorized the article as a “mix of fact reporting and analysis” with a “middle/balanced” bias.

A video from the Chris Cillizza YouTube channel calls the project a “boondoggle with a no bid contract and a price tag seven times the original estimate.” Cillizza gives background about how the project was launched, with an original goal of painting the bottom “American flag blue.” He refers to reporting by the New York Times, which found that the original $1.8 million project has now grown to an estimated $13 million and said that work may not be completed on time. He says Trump keeps changing his story about how the Atlantic Industrial Coding Company was awarded the no-bid contract. He concludes by saying the project “has gone totally off the rails” and it “looks like another black mark on the Trump administration’s record…” Analysts noted the host’s “snarky” negative commentary about the project when rating it as “analysis” with a “skews left” bias.

An article from RedState focuses on the lawsuit, and its position on it is laid out in the headline: “President Trump Turned Off Their Money Spigot, and Now They’re Suing Him Over Blue Paint.” The article says that “yet another Democrat-adjacent organization” is suing Trump for “daring to improve the appearance of the Reflecting Pool.” The article explains the lawsuit filed by The Cultural Landscape Foundation before concluding that “all of this could just be passed off as Democrats doing Democrat things” except that the TCLF has an “axe to grind” after it lost federal grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars during DOGE cuts. It says the group is “still bitter over Trump’s attempts to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government – and he must pay for it.” Because of the criticism of Democrats, the article was rated as “opinion” with a “strong right” bias.

Two pieces of content were rated as “selective or incomplete/unfair persuasion” with a bias to the left. A video from the MS NOW show “The Briefing with Jen Psaki” calls the project a “huge freakin’ mess.” Psaki reports that the project is coming in over budget and the repairs are “uneven and behind schedule, and so naturally Trump is distancing himself from the company doing those repairs.” Psaki shows clips of Trump talking about the contractors that he knows personally. Psaki interviews Democratic Congressman Joe Nuguse, who recently questioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about the project and why it didn’t follow federal procurement laws. Nuguse says Burgum “couldn’t offer a cogent rationale for why his agency gave a no-bid $13 million contract to this contractor,” saying “at best, it is a gross waste of taxpayer resources. At worst, it’s another violation potentially of federal procurement laws.” He says it’s “symptomatic of the grift and the fraud and I think the corruption that we’ve seen within this administration.” The video was rated with a “strong left” bias and “selective/incomplete” because it included only one side of the debate.

An article from We Got This Covered earned a slightly lower bias score of “hyper-partisan left.” The headline makes its position clear: “Donald Trump faces lawsuit as he wastes taxpayers’ millions on tacky makeover of Reflecting Pool: The renovation is so ugly it should be a crime.” The article accuses Trump of “vandalizing” the Reflecting Pool, another example of his “habit of destroying genuinely beautiful architecture and spaces such as the Rose Garden and replacing them with something only a thick-headed Wall Street clown would find visually appealing.” The article gives details about the lawsuit but wonders if it will make a difference: “Trump hasn’t let the courts stop him before, his usual tactic is to just brute force his desired change because once it’s done who’s going to be able to undo it?” Analysts noted the frequent insults about the project and about Trump, leading to its rating of “unfair persuasion.”

The lowest-rated coverage from our content set came from an article by American Thinker that compares the Reflecting Pool renovations by both President Obama and President Trump. It uses a post from X as proof that the media is dishonest in its comparison of the projects and the presidents. The article describes Obama’s “primary accomplishment” as “‘soaring rhetoric’ that accomplished nothing” but did “enormous damage to race relations, our medical insurance structure, international relations, and America in general.” The article says Trump “was twice elected POTUS, not on ‘soaring rhetoric,’ but on accomplishment, ability, and because he’s a man who keeps his promises, knows things, and knows how to build things under budget and ahead of schedule. He does what others can’t.” Analysts found that the article “contains inaccurate information” about gas prices during Obama’s term and makes many other assertions against Obama and in support of Trump without fair context and facts to back them up. They noted that the author heaps praise on Trump while “unfairly insulting” Obama, leading to a bias rating of “hyper-partisan right.”

If you’d like to follow along on our weekly Topic of the Week exercise, you can do so by visiting our website. New Topics of the Week are posted 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.

Beth Heldebrandt is Director of Communications at Ad Fontes Media. She has more than 35 years of experience in the fields of journalism and public relations, and was an adjunct instructor of journalism for 17 years at Eastern Illinois University. Beth has a B.A. in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and an M.A. in English from Eastern Illinois University. She’s a mom and grandma, and enjoys traveling, puzzles and reading.