Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance recently visited the Southwest, touting the success of immigration policies during the Trump administration while criticizing Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ work on immigration during the Biden administration.

Our analysts examined media coverage of Vance’s campaign stops 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 Vance’s stops in the Southwest: “JD Vance addresses swing-state crowd in Nevada,” from the NewsNation website; “Vance to visit southern border as Republicans focus on immigration issues,” from The Independent; “Vance during border visit: Harris’ policies ‘cause real human beings to suffer,‘ from CatholicVote; “Nevada’s ‘Childless-Cat-Ladies’ tell JD Vance to ‘go back to that sofa’ ahead of his visit to the Silver State,” from the New York Post; “Vance makes 1st Arizona-Mexico border visit amid drastic dip in migrant apprehensions,” from KJZZ Phoenix; “Vance to Newsmax: Open Border Imports New Voters for Dems,” from Newsmax.

The ratings for each of these articles can be found on the website. Let’s take a closer look at the reporting from The Independent and CatholicVote.

The Independent is a British online newspaper based in London. Our analyst team has rated several articles from this source and have given it a bias rating of -7.48 (skews left) and a reliability rating of 38.57 (analysis or wide variation of reliability). This week’s article received similar scores, with a bias rating of -10 (skews left) and a reliability rating of 40 (mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting).

The article details the Trump/Vance campaign’s criticisms of “radical-left” border security and immigration policy under the Biden/Harris administration but quickly turns the blame back on the GOP. “Harris’s campaign responded by pointing out that it was Trump who lobbied against a bipartisan, congressional border security bill earlier this year,” the article states.

The article takes issue with the Republicans calling Harris Biden’s “border czar,” arguing that “…she never held any such title. She was tasked with duties concerning the border — like leading diplomatic efforts to cut down on poverty, violence, and corruption in Central American countries …” 

In fact, the article makes the point twice. After including a quote from a recent speech by Trump that predicted danger in America “If border czar Harris stays in charge,” the article reiterates: “Despite Trump and the Republican’s insistence otherwise, Harris was never tasked with the explicit job of securing the southern border.” 

Instead, the article suggests that the GOP is attacking Harris on immigration because it’s struggling to find another hotbed political issue, citing a previous quote by Vance that “Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden.” 

The article’s strong defense of Harris and implication that the Trump campaign is grasping to find an issue on which to attack Harris led our analysts to give it a “skews left” bias rating.

CatholicVote is a member-funded website connected to the CatholicVote.org lobbying organization. Its mission is to “inspire every Catholic in America to live out the truths of our faith in public life.” Our analysts have given this source an aggregate score of 15.45 for bias (strong right) and 14.1 for reliability (contains misleading info). This week’s article was given a similar bias score (13.33, strong right) but a much higher reliability score of 37.67 (analysis or other issues).

Like The Independent, this article also details Vance’s criticism of Harris’ work on immigration but takes it a bit farther, using Vance’s words to explain “how the increased amount of fentanyl coming across the border is destroying thousands of American families.” 

While visiting the Arizona-Mexico border, Vance told the story of his own drug-addicted mother and then placed blame on Harris: “There are a lot of moms and dads out there that will never see their kids walk down the aisle because of what Kamala Harris has unleashed at the border,” Vance said.

Our analysts called this “reporting with an agenda.” While the facts of Vance’s border visit are included, the article, our analysts note, “platforms his extreme statement” of blaming Harris for parents dying of fentanyl overdoses.

Regarding the term “border czar,” the article states that many of the same media outlets who previously used the title in regards to Harris are now “claiming that she never had any such role – an assertion that critics blasted as biased and ‘Orwellian.’”

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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