On Aug. 12, billionaire Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, sat down with Donald Trump to broadcast what he said would be a normal conversation (as opposed to a campaign speech) with the former president. 

The two-hour broadcast started over 40 minutes late due to technical difficulties, and the reactions to the interview were lackluster, but mixed. Media coverage of the interview on X was 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 with Trump: “X interview between Donald Trump and Elon Musk plagued with tech issues” from WHYY, “Trump rehashes familiar talking points on immigrants, Biden in X chat with Musk” from ABC News (website), “Trump, Musk Overcome Tech Issues For Marathon Interview To Over 1,000,000 Listeners” from Daily Caller, “Trump-Musk interview: 5 biggest takeaways from the 2024 presidential election to the US border crisis” from Fox News (website), “Donald Trump Has Jumped The Shark” from Vanity Fair, and “Trump rambles, slurs his way through Elon Musk interview. It was an unmitigated disaster.” from USA Today. 

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 Fox News (website). 

USA Today is the flagship of the USA Today Network, a national digital media organization with headquarters in McLean, Virginia. Our analysts have rated several articles from this source and have given it an aggregate bias score of -4.22 (middle or balanced) and reliability score of 41.2 (mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting). Our analysts gave this week’s article a score of -20.33 (hyperpartisan left) and reliability score of 26.33 (opinion or other issues).

This article was penned by “humor(ish)” columnist Rex Huppke, and it does take a satirical view of the interview. The article begins: “For a fascism-curious billionaire who loves cuddling up to right-wing loons, Elon Musk sure is good at making right-wing politicians look stupid.” 

When it came to the 40-minute technical delay, Huppke said, “It was amateur hour, the last thing a campaign struggling to project competence needed.” Trump, Huppke said, “was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden. He was also badly slurring his words, raising questions about his health, and doing nothing to knock down rising concerns about his age and well-being … He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.”

The article doesn’t hold back about Musk (“… he has the interview skills of a stoned introvert”) and says that Trump’s familiar litany of complaints has become boring: “Build a wall. Drill, baby, drill. Marxist, socialist something-something. Harris only recently became Black. Blah, blah, blah.” It is very difficult to miss this article’s left-leaning bias against Trump.

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. Founded in 1996, Fox News is owned by Fox News Media, part of the Fox Corporation created by Rupert Murdoch. Our analysts have rated several articles from the website and have given it an aggregate bias score of 11.57 (skews right) and reliability score of 35.14 (analysis or wide variation in reporting). Our analysts gave this week’s article a score of 11.67 (skews right) and 34.67 for reliability (analysis or other issues).

This article focused on what it determined are the five greatest takeaways of the interview: Trump will be returning to the town in Pennsylvania where he was shot; he called the assassination attempt a “miracle” because it missed; that he will have “the largest deportation in the history of this country”; that Biden is “the worst president in history”; and that he will “close up” the Department of Education if he is elected president. 

The article does not go into much depth on these takeaways, merely stating that they exist. The bias here is one of absence: the article shows Trump in a positive light by listing some of what they consider his wins from the interview and skips all of the issues that many other media outlets reported from the interview. By ignoring the concerns of the left it gives power to 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.