Last week, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed a bill that requires any state school that receives public funding, from kindergarten through colleges and universities, to display the Ten Commandments of the Christian faith in classrooms. This decision has drawn both praise and ire.

Proponents of the bill call the Ten Commandments “foundational documents of our state and national government,” while those who oppose it — and who have already filed a suit against it — worry that it oversteps the boundary between church and state, that it will engender a feeling of religious superiority for those students who are Christian, and that it implies that the government supports those of the Christian faith over all others.

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 new Louisiana law: “Local Constitutional expert gives perspective on Louisiana mandating Ten Commandments in public schools” from NBC 21 WFMJ Youngstown, “Thou Shalt Not Covet State Power” from Reason, “Louisiana becomes 1st state requiring Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms” from Axios, “Louisiana Is a Legitimate Christian Theocracy Now” from Pajiba, “Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools is fine – as long as they note the ones Trump broke” from USA Today, and “CNN contributor challenges James Carville in 10 Commandments debate: Don’t ‘call me a book burner’” from Fox News (website).

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 USA Today and the Fox News website.

USA Today is the flagship of the USA Today Network, a national digital media organization with headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and digital properties in 45 states. The aggregate scores from all articles rated by our analyst team from this source are -3.86 for bias (middle or balanced) and 41.21 for reliability (mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting). This week’s article was rated at -16 for bias (strong left) and 26.67 for reliability (opinion or other issues).

The USA Today article can only be described as sarcastic. It does briefly state the facts: “Louisiana’s governor signed a law requiring a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state…” but swiftly pivots to a point that rings true for many on the left: “…something I’m completely fine with as long as those posters say, in large font along the top: ‘The Ten Commandments, Most of Which Donald Trump Has Violated.’ That seems fair, and I would be comfortable with students of any age walking into a classroom and receiving a daily lesson on the meaning of hypocrisy.” Ouch.

The article quotes Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s defense of the bill: “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.” But the article author slaps back with: “Okey doke. Let’s go with that. Because respecting the rule of law matters. And if we’re respecting the rule of law, I’m sure Gov. Landry would agree it would be educational malfeasance not to inform Louisiana students that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and former president – a man Landry himself has enthusiastically endorsed – has broken a slew of the laws outlined on their classroom poster.”

This is a direct attack on the right, specifically against Landry and Trump.

The Fox News website posts news and information online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s the digital partner to the cable news channel with the same name. The aggregate scores from all articles rated by our analyst team from this source are 11.61 for bias (skews right) and 35.18 for reliability (analysis or wide variation in reliability). This week’s article was rated at 4.67 for bias (middle or balanced) and 34.33 for reliability (analysis or other issues).

This article highlights a segment that appeared on CNN in which James Carville, a Democratic political strategist and television personality, and Scott Jennings, a conservative CNN contributor, got into a verbal scuffle while giving reactions to the Louisiana bill. The clip in the article is barely a minute long and does not provide much context, but Carville states that “the correlation between book burners and people that want the 10 Commandments is high.” Jennings is quick to reject the insinuation that he is a book burner and says so, with the show host, Anderson Cooper, chiming in that there have been no reports of book-burning support by Jennings.

This story did not add much to the conversation about the Ten Commandments bill in Louisiana, but it does have an excellent show of bias. This clip, which was an attack on a right-leaning personality from one on the left, was reposted on the Fox News website without much context or analysis. Its purpose seems to be to make the left look slightly unhinged as Carville appears to draw a direct correlation between posting a religious document and book burning, something traditionally connected to a very different type of rule of law. Solid move from the right.

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.