Time Magazine recently named Taylor Swift its Person of the Year, and people had opinions! Our analyst team took a closer look at some of the media coverage of this decision 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.

The articles rated by our analysts were “Left-Wing Pop Sensation Taylor Swift Crowned Time Magazine Person of the Year” from Breitbart, “Of all the people Time could have chosen for its ‘Person of the Year,’ why Taylor Swift?” from The Blaze, “Taylor Swift’s ‘Time’ Cover Is Breaking Far-Right Brains” from Rolling Stone, “Taylor Swift is Time’s person of the year and the far right is big mad about it” from Daily Kos, “Taylor Swift named Time’s ‘Person of the Year’” from CNN, and “Taylor Swift tops Time’s (and seemingly everyone else’s) person of the year list” from NBC. The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page. This week, we will take a deeper look into the articles from Breitbart and The Blaze.

Let’s acknowledge: It’s inconceivable for you to not have heard of Taylor Swift — this year’s Time’s Person of the Year. Swift is an award-winning singer and songwriter, a generous individual, and happens to be dating this famous football player. 

Why the controversy about her selection as Person of the Year, you may ask? She is guilty of encouraging her fans to register to vote, and that plus her superstar power paired with her outspoken political beliefs make her a ripe target for conservative thinkers. Not to mention, her boyfriend is a spokesperson for Pfizer and actively encourages folks to get their flu and COVID vaccine. Read through this week’s articles for more details.

Our analysts have assigned Breitbart an aggregate score of 30.89 for reliability, putting it in the opinion or wide variation in reliability area, and 14.96 for bias, giving it a strong right lean. This week’s article was rated at 20.67 for reliability, putting it in the selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda category, and 16.33 for bias, or strong right lean. 

Breitbart starts off strong. Aside from calling Taylor Swift “left-wing,” it espouses that, “The jet-setting climate change activist, who endorses Democrats, attacks Republicans, and performs for Communist human rights abusing-China’s Singles Day, told the magazine she is ‘the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt.’” 

The author of this article was mad that Swift encouraged folks to vote, mad that she did not condemn Hamas’ attack on Israel, and mad that she accused former President Donald Trump of “stoking the fires of white supremacy.” The author was attempting to tarnish the reputation of Swift by linking her to the CCP and Hamas without any supporting evidence.

Our analysts highlighted that the article uses opinionated context and misleading characterizations to make its point, like the above-mentioned voting rights vs Hamas. These are important topics, yes, but they are a false equivalency. Encouraging people to vote is not international politics. 

In addition, this article fails to mention any of the reasons why she became Time’s Person of the Year or that her Eras tour boosted the U.S. economy to the tune of $5.7 billion (The Washington Post breaks this down; it’s pretty cool). Fascinating insights.

The Blaze has an aggregate score of 31.94 for reliability, putting it in the opinion or wide variation in reliability area, and 15.17 for bias, giving it a strong right lean. This week’s article was rated at 22.33 for reliability, putting it in the selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda section of the chart, and 17 for bias, putting it in the strong right category. 

The Blaze does mention that “Swift has cemented herself as one of the most popular people in the world,” but the accolades stop there. The staff authoring this article quote conservative talk show hosts Glenn Beck and Stu Burguiere as asserting that, “In fact, since it’s leftists choosing the winner, the role [Person of the Year] may be more likely to go to an anti-Semite than to someone who’s done anything honorable.” 

This is an interesting tactic, where they are stating as fact that the staff of Time Magazine are leftists and anti-Semites. It is something that we saw to a lesser degree in the Breitbart article, where they put two unconnected topics — Hamas and voting — together, in hopes of cementing them as such in their readers’ minds. 

This article, too, fails to mention any of the reasons why Time decided that Swift was their Person of the Year, though it does take a bit of a right turn and suggests other anti-Semetic candidates for Person of the Year. 

A quick aside: why was she chosen? In the words of Time, “2023 was a year with significant shares of darkness. In a divided world, where too many institutions are failing, Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light. No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well. Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.” You can read the full explanation here.

These are just two 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 the 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.