On March 8, Ronna McDaniel stepped down from her position as head of the Republican National Committee, an organization that supports party candidates around the country with research, polling, and funding. In an interview, McDaniel said that “the RNC has historically undergone change once we have a nominee,” though there is speculation that she was ousted by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Two weeks after she left the RNC, McDaniel joined NBC as a political commentator, but she was let go four days later following an explosive backlash from the hosts of many of the programs on the typically liberal-leaning network. Our analysts examined coverage of McDaniel’s short-lived tenure at NBC 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.

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 McDaniel’s recent career moves from various media outlets last week: “Ronna McDaniel mess shows problem of politics-to-pundit conveyor belt” from The Guardian, “The common lesson from the MSNBC uproar and Trump’s Bible business” from The Washington Post, “The Ronna McDaniel incident reveals a deeper dilemma for journalism” from Columbia Journalism Review, “NBC Rejects Trump Voice but Embraces War Party” from The Intercept, “NBC’s Ronna McDaniel meltdown: Falsehoods and debunked narratives MSNBC promoted on its ‘sacred airwaves‘” from Fox News (website), and “Former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel dropped as an NBC contributor following outcry” from NPR. While the bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page, we are going to take a closer look at articles from the Washington Post and the Fox News website.

The Washington Post is a daily newspaper based in Washington, D.C., that specializes in national politics. Founded in 1877, the paper has won more than 65 Pulitzer Prizes. The Post website was launched in 1996. Since 2013, the Post has been owned by Nash Holdings, led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Our analyst team has given the Post an aggregate score for bias of -6.58 (skews left) and for reliability of 39.49 (analysis or wide variation in reliability). This week’s article is clearly labeled an opinion piece written by Georgetown University government professor Dr. E.J. Dionne Jr., and it was rated at -12 for bias (on the line between skews left and strong left) and 31.67 for reliability (opinion or wide variation in reliability).

Dionne makes his argument with pinpoint accuracy: “In the case of NBC, the problem with hiring McDaniel was not that she served as head of the Republican National Committee or that she is a conservative… Nor [her] past role as a political operative… No, the problem with McDaniel and what led to a staff uprising was her complicity in Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and her joining in his lies over the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory.”

He also counters McDaniel’s statement from a recent interview when she acknowledged that Biden won the election but then added: “I have always said, and I continue to say, there were issues [with the election] in 2020. I believe that both can be true.” “‘There were issues.’ Really?” Dionne writes. “This is giving with one hand and taking with the other, a soft way of rationalizing the GOP’s war on elections.”

This is the sticky point in both McDaniel’s firing and with the difficulty in presenting both sides of an argument in the media. Or as Dionne states, “No news outlet should seek to ‘balance’ truth with falsehood or to hire, in the name of ideological diversity, anyone complicit in undermining the democratic project itself. NBC News’s leaders should not have had to learn the hard way that Trump’s corruption of the political conversation has drawn a sharp line between right and wrong approaches to balance.” 

This opinion article contains evidence of left-leaning bias by calling out the GOP for making war on elections, for calling out Trump as having corrupted the political conversation, and for a comparison on Trump’s effects on media and on religion. Take a read to see if you can spot it.

The Fox News website posts news and information online 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is the digital partner to the cable news channel with the same name. Founded in 1996, Fox News is owned by Fox News Media, part of the Fox Corporation created by Rupert Murdoch. Its aggregate score for bias is 11.56 (skews right) and for reliability is 35.38 (analysis or wide variation in reliability). This week’s article was rated at 22.33 for bias (hyper-partisan right) and 22.67 for reliability (selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda).

The article characterizes McDaniel as having been ousted by “a mob” who characterized her as “dishonest and labeled an ‘election denier’ over her actions on behalf of former President Trump over his claims of a rigged 2020 race, as well as her own remarks that it was unfair.”

Then the article explains its subheading, “MSNBC aggressively pushed Trump-Russia collusion narrative,” by working to discredit MSNBC, which is the more left-leaning subsidiary of NBC. The article states that MSNBC pushed a Russia-Trump collusion narrative, ignored that Hunter Biden’s laptop was full of criminal information about his father, and glossed over Jussie Smollett’s “hate crime” hoax, in addition to other complaints about the network. None of these accusations are related to Ronna McDaniel or the network that she was fired from (NBC). 

This article displays a right-leaning bias by referring to MSNBC anchors as a mob and for pushing the narrative that the network is not trustworthy based on its previous coverage of politically contentious news.

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, 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.