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®. This week we looked at coverage of Hunter Biden purchasing a gun when he was using illegal drugs. 

To create the article sets, we select six articles reporting on the same story from different outlets to show how they 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.

The story is fairly straightforward. Hunter Biden’s history with alcohol, women, and drugs is no secret, and one day he purchased a handgun but allegedly lied about the fact that he was using drugs, which would have halted the process. It has been reported that he possessed the gun for about 11 days, that the gun was never used, and it was later discarded in the garbage, but the purchase record remained. As this charge was piled on top of his existing tax evasion charges, it has been a touchstone for both sides. Predictably, the left decries it as a political stunt while the right feel that it hasn’t gone far enough.

From this week’s set, there are two articles that stand out: “Hunter Biden Indicted on Federal Charges for Claiming He Was Not a Drug User on Gun Form” from Information Liberation, which scored 20 for bias and 19 for reliability, and “Trump Responds to Hunter Biden Indictment with Major Allegation: ‘The Only Crime…That Does Not Implicate Crooked Joe‘” from The Western Journal, which scored 18 for bias and 20 for reliability. 

Both of these articles push past the facts of the story and go directly to how this should make the Republican party, and specifically Trump supporters, feel. The Information Liberation article sums this point up nicely: “Republicans are now supposed to be thrilled that the president’s son — who has no power whatsoever — is being punished for some minor lie while Trump faces potentially life in prison from four indictments and over 1,000 Trump supporters were charged in relation to J6 [January 6th] — with multiple getting decades in prison on bogus “seditious conspiracy” charges. Watching injury suffered upon your political rivals by a nonconforming family member is a time-honored tradition, but it certainly is not the end game for our country’s politics (and if you want to read more, The Chicago Tribune ran a fun article talking about this exact topic in 2019). 

The Western Journal article was similarly structured, skimming the facts of the story in favor of focusing on Trump’s response. Trump appears to be of the opinion that is the impetus behind the impeachment proceedings, of whether Hunter Biden’s father had any hand in his business dealings, and he lamented in a Truth Social post quoted in the story that “the gun charge is the only crime that Hunter Biden committed that does not implicate Crooked Joe Biden.” 

In our rating system, articles are analyzed for markers of their bias and reliability. Reliability is broken down into three main factors: expression, veracity, and headline and graphics. In broad strokes, the highest ratings go to news articles that are mostly factual, perhaps with some analysis for context, and little to no opinion (expression), in which the facts of the story are easily provable and widely accepted (veracity), and in which the images used with the story are recent, fair, and relevant to the story and are accompanied by a headline that is likewise relevant and not clickbait (headline and graphics).

Neither of the articles meet these high water marks; instead, they present opinions and screenshots that are geared toward making their readers feel a certain way. How often have you read an article that tickles your confirmation bias? Probably quite a bit. I know that I have. 

Confirmation bias primes us to believe things that we already agree with, like the Bidens having criminal dealings because we don’t like them. It is difficult to fight against because breaking those barriers requires a degree of critical thinking and self-awareness that we often do not apply to the news we read. 

But we should. Drawing your own conclusions is one of the hallmarks of a free and democratic society and is not a freedom that we should give up for the brief dopamine burst that confirmation bias triggers. 

Want to know more about this topic or other Starter or Advanced Topics of the Week? Check out our website, and come back next week for another examination of the news.

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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.