Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, recently declared that in a recent interview, her father had entirely mischaracterized her young childhood and transition from male to female. Musk stated that “his 20-year-old child is ‘dead’ — because she transitioned from male to female,” said that he had “been tricked” into signing paperwork to allow Vivian to go on puberty blockers as a teen, and that at 4 years old she had shown a remarkable love of musicals and the theater. 

With the larger issue of transgender rights underlining this entire exchange, people on the left supported Vivian when she went public with her declarations, while those on the right lined up behind Musk as a powerful critic for gender ideology. These reactions were evident in media coverage of the exchange as examined by our analysts 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.

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 Musk’s interview and his daughter’s reaction to it: “Elon Musk’s transgender daughter, in first interview, says he berated her for being queer as a child” from CNBC, “Elon Musk’s estranged daughter calls out his ‘entirely fake’ claims about her childhood” from CNN, “Why the trans community finds Elon Musk’s latest insults harder to ignore” from the San Francisco Chronicle, “Elon Musk’s Trans Daughter Brutally Hits Back After He Said She Was ‘Dead’” from HuffPost, “Elon Musk’s anti-woke ‘awakening’ has a tragic backstory” form New York Post, and “Amy Hamm: Elon Musk’s heartbreaking path to crusading gender heretic” from National Post.

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 Huffington Post and National Post.

HuffPost (formerly The Huffington Post) is a news website based in New York City. Founded in 2005 by Ariana Huffington and others, HuffPost was owned by Verizon Media, but was sold to BuzzFeed in November 2020. Our analysts have rated several articles from this source and have given it an aggregate bias score of -10.63 (skews left) and reliability score of 37.86 (analysis or wide variation in reliability). Our analysts gave this week’s article a score of -9.67 (skews left) and reliability score of 35.67 (analysis or other issues).

This article is short and focuses first on Musk’s interview with Jordan Peterson on his podcast, produced by Daily Wire — a source classified with a strong right bias — in which he “dialed up his transphobic rhetoric” in talking about his child: “…my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.” 

Musk’s estranged daughter clapped back on social media to correct some of his story but said that she ultimately found it funny. “Calling me dead on a podcast with JORDAN PETERSON of all people while basically admitting you have zero reading comprehension by saying you were ‘tricked’ into signing documents that you read over multiple times is basically a parody of itself. Like it’s honestly camp.” 

She debunked a few more items from his interview before stating: “This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this. He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there… and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”

On the surface level, this is a story about a daughter taking her famous dad to task in public, but it’s also related to transgender rights, which has been a hot political topic. In general, the left has expressed support for transgender rights, and the right has argued against them. This article was given a bias rating of “skews left” because it focuses on Vivian’s story as opposed to Musk’s words.

National Post is a Canadian English-language newspaper and the flagship publication of Postmedia Network. Our analysts have rated several articles from this source and have given it an aggregate bias score of 1.54 (middle or balanced) and reliability score of 42.85 (mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting). Our analysts gave this week’s article a score of 13.33 for bias (strong right) and 31.33 for reliability (opinion or other issues).

This article is an opinion piece penned by Amy Hamm, one of the founders of CaWsbar, which has argued against transgender-inclusive laws in Canada. She explained the issue this way: “In an interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Musk posited that Xavier had been killed by wokeness, in the form of gender ideology.” 

The story includes a longer version of the Musk quote from the HuffPost article: “I lost my son, essentially. They call it deadnaming for a reason. The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son is dead. So, my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.”

When it comes to Musk’s claim that he was being tricked into signing papers allowing for puberty blockers, Hamm states, “His revelation is unprecedented: if Musk — armed both with the resources of a billionaire and an IQ that dwarfs the average score — can be persuaded to approve the transitioning of a child based on poor or zero evidence, then any parent could be.” 

She applauds Musk for his courage: “How many parents could admit to what Musk has, rather than choosing, for their own sanity, to believe that they made the right choice when they greenlighted their own children for the world’s largest — and arguably the worst — medical scandal in history?”

Vivian’s response is not mentioned in this article at all. The effusive support for Musk, and through him, the conservative stance on transgender rights, gives this article its “strong right” bias rating.

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.