On Jan. 17, 2021, an upside-down American flag was seen flying at the Virginia home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. The inverted flag has a long history but was most recently adopted by rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol less than two weeks earlier, on Jan. 6.

Last week, the New York Times reported that another flag with ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection — an “Appeal to Heaven” flag — was flown at the Alitos’ vacation home in New Jersey as late as 2023. In both instances, Justice Alito has said that his wife chose to fly the flags, and he was not involved.

Democrats believe these flags indicate support for the people involved on Jan. 6, and they want Justice Alito to recuse himself from pending cases related to the insurrection. Republicans, however, are backing Justice Alito’s wife, who said that she raised the inverted flag as a “sign of distress” during a political dispute with a neighbor and who was also reportedly unaware of any meaning behind the “Appeal to Heaven” flag.

Our team examined media coverage of this issue from across the political spectrum in this week’s 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®.

Our analyst team examined the following articles about the Alitos’ flags published last week: “Flagpole to Heaven” from Reason, “Alito and Thomas remain proudly obstinate” from The Seattle Times, “Alito Ethics Defense Blown Up by Second Insurrectionist Flag” from New York Magazine, “Don’t Look Now, but the Alito Flag Story Just Got Even Dumber” from National Review, “Democrats renew calls for US Supreme Court’s Alito to recuse amid flag flap” from Reuters, and “Alito faces growing flak from Democrats over 2nd flag controversy” from Axios. The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page. In this blog we will take a deeper dive into the reporting from National Review and The Seattle Times.

National Review is a biweekly conservative opinion magazine founded in 1955, and since 2015 has been published by the nonprofit National Review Institute. Ad Fontes Media analysts have rated numerous articles from this source and have given it an aggregate score of 13.44 for bias (strong right) and 31.39 for reliability (opinion or wide variation in reliability). This week’s article was rated at 12.33 for bias (strong right) and 32.67 for reliability (analysis or wide variation in reliability). 

The National Review article is a wholesale attack on the New York Times and the four reporters who broke both flag stories. Senior writer Dan McLaughlin describes the Times article as an agitprop, or political propaganda masquerading as art, and that might be the nicest thing that he says about it at all.

The article leans heavily on sarcasm, including this in the lead paragraph, “This is what passes for political journalism these days.” And later, in describing the history of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, or what it calls the Pine Tree Flag: “John Locke? Another subversive! Is the whole Enlightenment in on the conspiracy? We may never know how deep this runs.”

Sarcasm is dripping in the final paragraph: “Of course, it is true that the Pine Tree Flag is associated today with conservatives, just as is true of virtually all Founding-era patriotic iconography, including the Constitution itself. But that is mostly just a symptom of the political Left having abandoned the American Founding and its philosophy. Wait until the Times finds out that Old Glory, which was carried by some January 6 rioters, is flown by the Supreme Court itself.”

Our analysts found a very strong right bias in this article toward the left (and specifically the New York Times, to which Ad Fontes Media has given an aggregate bias score of -8.03, or skews left). 

Now, let’s turn our focus to the article by The Seattle Times, which was founded in 1891 and serves Washington state and the Pacific Northwest region. The aggregate scores from Ad Fontes Media analysts for this source are -7.54 for bias (skews left) and 40.6 for reliability (mix of fact reporting and analysis). This week’s article was rated at -16.33 for bias (strong left) and 30 for reliability (opinion or wide variation in reliability). 

This article is clearly labeled as an opinion piece from David Horsey, a staff cartoonist, whose work graces the top of the article and is itself a hard criticism of Alito and fellow Justice Clarence Thomas (whose wife was reportedly active in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election). This article is quite short, just three paragraphs, with the main point that “Both Thomas and Alito insist that their spouses’ provocative political acts had nothing to do with them and that, therefore, there is no reason they should recuse themselves from ruling on cases before the high court that involve convicted Jan. 6 rioters or Donald Trump…” 

Horsey also points out that, “In any other court in the land, jurists would be barred from hearing such cases because of the obvious appearance of bias, but members of the Supreme Court do not have to live by any such rule because the proud boys in the black robes are unelected potentates with lifetime tenure who are limited only by the elasticity of their personal ethical standards.” 

Our analysts found a lot of left-leaning bias packed into this brief article, mostly for the shade thrown at the justices who, in Horsey’s mind, have troublesome connections to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

These are just two examples of the tens of thousands of articles our analysts have rated for reliability and bias. If you want a look at the larger media landscape or are curious to see how our analysts have rated your favorite sources, head on over to our website and check out the resources we have available. And don’t forget to come back for another examination of our 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.