On July 21, President Biden announced that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. The announcement came after weeks of pressure from his party to end his presidential bid after his age took center stage over his policies. At 81, Biden already holds the record for oldest president.

Biden’s decision energized the Democratic Party, although early polls show Harris tied with Donald Trump, and the Republican Party had a range of reactions. These were evident in media coverage of the announcement as examined by our analysts in our 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.

Using those sets 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 President Biden dropping out of the race: “Biden drops out of the 2024 presidential race, endorses Vice President Kamala Harris for nomination” from CBS News, “Biden ends failing reelection campaign, backs Harris as nominee” from Reuters, “Donald Trump Wastes No Time Fundraising Off Joe Biden’s Exit From 2024 White House Bid; “He Just Quit The Race In Complete Disgrace!” – Update” from Deadline, “Joe Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race, Caving to Democratic Party Revolt” from National Review, “Joe Biden is too frail to run in 2024 but he’s still our president?” from New York Post, and “Donald Trump Is Now the Weaker Candidate” from New Republic.

The ratings for each of these articles can be found on the website. In this blog we will take a deeper dive into the reporting from New Republic and New York Post.

New Republic is an editorial magazine and website based in New York City that focuses on politics, culture, and the arts. It was founded in 1914, advocating for “liberal reform in a new industrial age.” Our analysts have rated several articles from this source and have given it an aggregate bias score of -17.32 (strong left) and reliability score of 30.66 (opinion or wide variation in reliability). Our analysts gave this week’s article a score of -19.67 for bias (hyper-partisan left) and 22.33 for reliability (selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda).

The tone of the article is evident in its subhead: “Beating the former president isn’t hard—if you have a nominee who can press the case against him. Joe Biden wasn’t that person. Kamala Harris is.” This author is very excited about the turn of events that led President Biden to bow to the wishes of his party and step out of the race and that put Kamala Harris front and center.

He is not kind to Biden but mostly he is critical of Trump, noting that “Trump is also old and deranged.” The author lays it all out for the reader: “Looking for a reason not to vote for Trump? You have several. At the end of his term, he will be older than Biden is now. He is a convicted felon. He is a fraudster. He has been found liable for sexual assault. He ran the most disorganized, incompetent presidential administration in American history.”

The article then predicts the doom that would come from a second Trump presidency: “The risk of global conflict would skyrocket. He would reward autocrats and authoritarians of all stripes. He would use the presidency to enrich himself and his family. He is surrounded by right-wing ghouls. He is planning on deporting 10 million people. He is Donald Trump, for God’s sake. (How did we get here again?)”

It is easy to spot the bias against Trump and the folks supporting him. This article is ebullient with it.

The New York Post is a daily newspaper founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton as The New-York Evening Post. Our analysts have rated several articles from this source and have given it an aggregate bias score of 9.21 (skews right) and reliability score of 32.52 (analysis or wide variation in reliability). Our analysts gave this week’s article a score of 22.67 for bias (hyper-partisan right) and 15 for reliability (contains misleading info).

This article asks a simple question: if Biden quit the presidential race because of his age, why is he still the president? The author here draws together the threads of a conspiracy to answer: “You can bet that leaving the president in place, despite the obvious peril to America, was part of the deal Biden struck to go quietly as Nancy Pelosi and the Obamacans ratcheted up the pain.”

The rest of the article is a compilation of maybes and attacks that were part of the Republican playbook of arguments against President Biden on the campaign trail: he’ll pardon his son Hunter, he’ll use his office to provide “as many dream holidays and bucket list wishes for as many extended family members as he can squeeze in,” there are financial incentives for him to exit the race, that he was incompetent all along but the media protected him.

There are many attacks against President Biden with little evidence, making the bias in this article hard to miss.

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, visit 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.