After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last month that Donald Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot, many media outlets took a closer look at the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and debated whether or not it disqualifies Trump from serving a second term as president. Our analyst team took a deep dive into this coverage 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.

One minimally biased article from Politico this week sums up the sticky topic at hand: “The 14th Amendment of the Constitution includes a clause that prohibits anyone who has ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion’ against the U.S. government from holding elected office if they had previously taken an oath ‘to support the Constitution of the United States.’ …[but] There are diverging legal views on whether Trump must actually be found guilty of the crime of ‘insurrection’ before he can be deemed constitutionally ineligible to serve for having ‘engaged in’ one.”

Our analyst team took a closer look at several articles from various media outlets on this topic: “Everything you need to know about Trump and the 14th Amendment” from Politico (and this is a great article to start with if you have not been following this topic), “Donald Trump Could Be Ousted Even If He Wins Election Under SCOTUS Ruling” from Newsweek, “It’s Time to Start Taking the 14th Amendment Very Seriously” from Esquire, “The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong” from The New York Times, “Former top Obama adviser says if Trump prevented from running it ‘would rip the country apart‘” from Fox News, and “Bukele says, thanks to Colorado banning Trump, the US lost its ability to lecture anyone about “democracy”…” from Trump.News. The bias and reliability scores for each of these articles can be found on our Topic of the Week page. 

At this point, we usually pick two articles and take a deeper dive into what ratings they received and why, but this week, one article, from Trump.News, was rated in the single digits for reliability, and since this is so rare, we are going to take a closer look.

Trump.News is owned by the Natural News Network. Ad Fontes Media has rated one of the network’s sources, Natural News, with an average score of 28.16 for bias, placing it in the “hyper-partisan right” category, and 9.26 for reliability, in the “contains misleading info” area of the chart. The article from Trump.News was rated similarly, with a 29.33 for bias, toeing the line between “hyper-partisan right” and “most extreme right” (which starts at 30), and a 5 for reliability, placing it among a select few articles that score below 8 and settling it in the “contains inaccurate/fabricated information” layer of the Media Bias Chart. 

The article includes a tweet stating that in light of the 14th Amendment decision in Colorado regarding Trump’s eligibility for office, “The United States has lost its ability to lecture any other country about ‘democracy.’” The tweet is backed up by Professor Jonathan Turley, who, while not introduced in the article, is a legal scholar who has done interviews lending his legal expertise on Fox News and other outlets. 

In this case, the article states, “Professor Turley is absolutely incensed by this anti-American action by the activist justices on the Colorado Supreme Court.” The article presumes that the audience trusts this man’s opinion. 

The article is short and sensationally written: “In their zealous obsession to exclude President Trump from the political arena, the activist justices relied on an obscure provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, originally intended to prevent Confederate soldiers from serving in Congress. This is desperation on a level we never thought we’d see in this country.”

Our analysts gave this article a low reliability rating for “conspiracy [and because it] equates un-Americanism with holding Trump accountable,” citing this portion of the article: “… the United States government, in its fervor to erase President Trump, has shown that it’s no different from the communist-run regimes of North Korea, Cuba, or Russia. As President Bukele perfectly expressed, the US has lost its moral high ground — ‘ground’ we never truly owned, but merely occupied under false pretenses.”

The analyst team noted that the article “uses quotes that dismiss Jan. 6th as an insurrection.” For example: “As Turley explains, January 6th was not a ‘revolution.’ Let’s be realistic; the majority of those present were equipped with nothing more than water bottles and fanny packs. How does one take over the United States with such weapons? This incident was a three-hour melee, which many suspect, for good reason, was instigated and orchestrated by the FBI.” Our analysts pointed out that there has been no credible evidence that the FBI was involved, leading this portion of the article down the road to conspiracy theory.

Furthermore, this statement — “The campaign to remove Trump from the political landscape has become such an obsession that it’s led the uni-party regime to reveal their true draconian plot” — is opinion and highly partisan. And this one — “We are no different from any other country that weaponizes its systems to take out political adversaries” — is wholly inaccurate. 

This article’s intent is to use inflammatory phrases and conspiracy theories to provoke the reader. Rarely do we see an article that is wholly structured for this one purpose, and even more rarely does it accomplish it with such disregard for the facts.

This is just one example 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.