The Republican presidential primary race began with a wide field but was steadily whittled down until two contenders remained — Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. Haley had a few successes but was, in the end, unable to stop Trump from securing the Republican nomination for president. She took the curious route of not only suspending her campaign (instead of outright ending it) but of leaving the race without endorsing Trump. Our analysts examined coverage of her decision 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.

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 took a closer look at several articles about Haley’s decision from various media outlets last week: “Nikki Haley to (finally) drop out of 2024 presidential race” from Not the Bee, “Nikki Haley says she’s suspending her presidential campaign. What does that mean?” from the AP, “Why a coalition of Haley-Biden voters could indeed decide this election” from the MSNBC website, “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” from Time Magazine, ““I have no regrets”: Nikki Haley suspends presidential campaign” from Axios, and “BREAKING: Nikki Haley Exits Presidential Race – Does NOT Endorse Trump!” from the Gateway Pundit. The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page. We will be looking closer at reactions from Not The Bee and Time Magazine.

According to their website, Not the Bee is “a humor-based news, opinion, and entertainment site from the creators of The Babylon Bee and Disrn. Like the name suggests, it’ll feature some absurd and hilarious (but real) news that seems like it should definitely be satire.” From its aggregate ratings on the Media Bias Chart®, articles from Not the Bee are usually rated at 22.45 for reliability (selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda) and 18.52 for bias (hyper-partisan right). The article about Haley was rated in the same general category for bias (18.67) but scored a bit higher for reliability, at 26.67 (opinion or wide variation in reliability).

This short article is heavy on sarcasm, “Well, she won Bernie’s Vermont and the Establishment Swamp of DC, but it’s finally time to throw in the towel,” sprinkled with a little bit of fact, “Haley was nearly swept by Donald Trump on Super Tuesday, but she came away with 9 delegates from the State of Vermont.” But in the end, the article is full of sarcasm, with a little bit of right-leaning glee at the defeat of Trump’s only remaining foe. 

Time Magazine is a weekly news magazine and website. It has been based in New York City since its first edition in 1923. Based on its aggregate scores on the Media Bias Chart®, it usually has a rating of 41.18 for reliability (mix of fact reporting and analysis) and -7.81 for bias (skews left). Our analysts rated this week’s article at 32 for reliability (on the line between opinion and analysis or wide variation in reliability) and -12.67 for bias (strong left). 

This article took less of a whimsical view of the upcoming presidential election. After stating the facts of Haley’s departure from the race, it analyzed the claims that the former president has made about the next four years: “Trump’s triumph gets him another step closer to reclaiming the presidency and pursuing a draconian policy agenda unlike any the nation has ever seen. He has vowed to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants; reimpose his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries; purge the federal bureaucracy of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists; force homeless Americans off the streets and into tent cities; and commandeer the Justice Department to exact revenge on his political enemies.”

The article then takes an interesting look at the playbook that it says Trump and his supporters have been using for the past three years. “When Trump left office in January 2021, after unleashing a mob on the U.S. Capitol, few foresaw him engineering a one-sided victory three years later, in one of the least competitive open primaries in U.S. history. But Trump and his allies did. They had a plan, from the start, to kneecap GOP heretics and scare off potential challengers.”

Trump dominated the Republican primary with barely an effort, the article says, as he “faced a weak field of rivals who were too timid to attack his greatest vulnerabilities.” And after Haley’s announcement, “[his] victory speech focused instead on the last man standing in the way of his return to power” and did not mention Haley’s name once.

These are just a few examples of the 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.