Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer forced a vote on the Right to IVF Act, which would make it a right nationwide for women to access in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments. The bill would have also expanded access through insurance as well as for military members and veterans.

This comes as both Democrats and Republicans are seeking to come up with a response to voters’ concerns about access to abortion and reproductive care — an issue that is expected to figure largely in the November election. Our team examined media coverage of the bill and its aftermath 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.

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 the Right to IVF Act from last week: “Senate Republicans block bill on women’s right to IVF as Democrats make push on reproductive care” from the Associated Press, “Senate Democrats Scheme For A Vote On Their Most Radical Taxpayer-Funded IVF Bill Yet” from The Federalist, Senate GOP blocks bill to guarantee access to IVF nationwide” from CNN (website), ”Democrats to force vote for protections for IVF as election-year messaging heats up” from NBC News (website), “‘So important for our families’: Senate to vote on the Right to IVF Act” from ABC WKBW 7, and “Southern Baptist Convention approves resolution opposing IVF” from Catholic News Agency.

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 ABC WKBW 7 and The Federalist.

ABC WKBW 7 is a news station based in Buffalo, N.Y., and focuses on news local to that area. The aggregate scores from all articles rated by our analyst team from this source are -2.83 for bias (middle or balanced) and 40.67 for reliability (mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting). This week’s article was rated at -14 for bias (strong left) and 28.33 for reliability (opinion or other issues).

This article is a brief overview of the issue but from a decidedly left-leaning standpoint. It does not mention the reasons why so many Republicans voted against the bill and, as our analysts pointed out, the writing “platforms Schumer.”

In other words, it focuses mainly on his very Democratic words and views, such as stating that “when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer said reproductive freedoms like IVF were put at risk” after mentioning how many American couples struggle with fertility (1 in 6). “This bill would establish your right to IVF services and make them more affordable, per Schumer.”

The article closes with a personal vignette about one woman who considers herself “lucky… that science was able to help us in that way.” Our analysts assigned a “strong left” bias rating to this story because of its focus solely on the Democratic position about the importance of IVF and why it matters to families without sharing details of the legislation itself nor the Republicans’ opinion of the bill. 

The Federalist is an online magazine that focuses on politics, culture, national security and crime. Founded in 2013, it reaches its readers through its website and an emailed newsletter.

The aggregate scores from all articles rated by our analyst team from this source are 19.06 for bias (hyper-partisan right) and 22.7 for reliability (selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda). This week’s article was rated at 19.33 for bias (hyper-partisan right) and 28 for reliability (opinion or other issues).

This article lambasts the Democrats from the start: “The bill mandates a host of morally deplorable practices that should deeply disturb Americans, especially those who are pro-life.” It sows the seeds of a left-leaning conspiracy with phrasing such as “…as even Democrats’ friendliest corporate media allies (like NBC News) admit.”

The story uses a lot of conspiracy buzz words when it states that the bill would force Americans to fund “the manufacture of motherless and fatherless children… surrogacy and experimental transhumanist technologies like artificial wombs, ‘gene editing,’ and the erasure of women in reproduction via in vitro gametogenesis.”

Another interesting technique in this article is using the term “Big Fertility” as a “boogeyman,” which refers to people or groups whose names are invoked to incite fear, anger or loathing among a certain audience (see our blog post from February for more information about this concept). This article has a fiercely right bias for its implication of a conspiracy from the left.

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.