On Feb. 28, 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States of America (SCOTUS) agreed to hear arguments surrounding the extent of presidential immunity in relation to a federal criminal case tied to former president Donald Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 elections. SCOTUS will hear arguments in late April, with a decision expected in late June, and the split between outrage and delight is pretty solidly down party lines. Our analysts took a closer look at media coverage of this issue 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.

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 from various media outlets on the Supreme Court’s decision last week: “Opinion: The Supreme Court has a different view of emergencies than we do” from CNN, “The Supreme Court just handed Trump an astonishing victory” from Vox, “Opinion | Why Is Trump Getting Special Treatment From the Supreme Court?” from Politico, “Trump Responds After Supreme Court Grants Review of His Presidential Immunity Appeal” from Your NEWS, “Supreme Court agrees to review whether Trump immune from prosecution in federal election interference case” from Fox News, and “Can Trump be prosecuted? Supreme Court will take up precedent-setting case to define the limits of presidential immunity” from The Conversation.

The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page. We will be looking closer at reactions from the left by examining the articles from Vox and Politico.

Vox is a news and opinion website founded in 2014 with a mission to “explain the news.” Based on the articles rated from this site, it has average scores of 40.30 for reliability (mix of fact reporting and analysis) and -9.87 for bias (skews left). The article this week was rated at 30 for reliability (opinion or wide variation in reliability) and -17 for bias (strong left).

The sentiment of this article is encapsulated in its subheading: “So much for the rule of law.” The author is coming from a common left-leaning state of mind with the belief that former president Trump unequivocally headed an insurrection that, if successful, would have subverted the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next — an unprecedented event. Trump and his team of lawyers have been fighting his bearing any responsibility for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and finally had the highest court in the country agree to hear the case.

The article states: “This order is a colossal victory for Trump, and could potentially allow him to evade criminal responsibility for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election altogether. Trump’s goal is to delay his trials until after Election Day. Should he prevail in that election, he can then order the Justice Department to drop all federal charges against him.”

After months of fighting through lower courts, the Trump legal team “was able to secure such an order from the justices by exploiting the fact that the federal judiciary ordinarily does not allow two different courts to have jurisdiction over the same case at the same time. So, when a party to a lawsuit or criminal proceeding appeals a trial court’s decision, the trial court often loses authority over that case until the appeal is resolved.”

This article has sided with the lower courts that have already found him culpable and raises serious doubts about the trustworthiness of the justices, many of whom were appointed by Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for president. “Simply put, Wednesday’s order is a disaster for anyone hoping that Trump may face trial before the November election.”

Politico is a media company founded in 2007 that focuses on politics and policy in America and across the world. Based on the articles rated from this site, it has average scores of 42.47 for reliability (mix of fact reporting and analysis) and -5.79 for bias (middle or balanced). The article this week was rated at 31 (opinion or wide variation in reliability) for reliability and -18 for bias (on the line between strong left and hyper-partisan left).

This opinion piece written by University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq takes an interesting approach. His argument is that the Supreme Court has been loath to hear cases that appear to forestall punishment and examines how odd it is to hear a case that was so thoroughly argued in the lower courts.

His analysis takes a hard look at the track record of SCOTUS and finds it wanting. The author notes that the current Supreme Court “has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment” (a delay is exactly what this author says Trump is seeking) and argues that this policy has been detrimental as a whole. “Many of the [death row] convictions the court has let stand are plausibly described as ‘riddled with errors.’ And in January, the court declined to hear a challenge to Alabama’s novel use of nitrogen gas to execute Kenneth Smith.”

The article asserts that it is certainly odd for SCOTUS to hear Trump’s case; while “Trump is within his right to appeal the decision… there’s no good reason for the Supreme Court to take it up and review it as a matter of law — especially given how thorough the D.C. Circuit was … the court’s erstwhile concern with ‘unjustified delay’ in criminal cases would seem to cut hard against hearing the case.” Just like the Vox article, the assertion that Trump is guilty is the baseline for the rest of the analysis.

These are just a few examples of the 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.