On his first day in office (of his second term) President Trump signed 26 executive orders, more than any other U.S. president on Day 1 of their term. Some of these received enough coverage to make it to the Media Bias Detector while others received less media attention from the top ten news publishers that the Media Bias Detector tracks in close to real-time.

Limited media coverage of Trump pardoning the January 6th rioters

Trump pardoned Jan 6. Rioters, but notably this received very little mainstream media coverage compared to when Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden on December 1, 2024.

Trump’s pardon of the group appeared briefly for just one day on the Events page of the Media Bias Detector on 1/20/25:

On the other hand, Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter was heavily covered on 12/1, 12/2, and 12/3 last year; it was featured in 41 article clusters on 12/2, as shown in the image below:

On 12/2, The Guardian published an article which correctly predicted that Trump would pardon the rioters. Within the same article they covered Joe Biden pardon of his son; they raised the ethical concerns of this while acknowledging that several former presidents have pardoned their own family members as well.

The Order to End Birthright Citizenship

The only executive order to become the most covered story of the day was the order to end birthright citizenship, which has been temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court.

While left-leaning articles center on the order being a clear violation of the 14th amendment, Fox News published an article arguing that ending birthright citizenship is in fact “constitutional.” However, challenging birthright citizenship received less coverage from right-leaning outlets than from their left-leaning counterparts.

Coverage on Immigration

While the Media Bias Detector tracks coverage of individual news stories, it also tracks coverage of topics more broadly, including Immigration which falls under the larger Politics category. By toggling different dates, users can see changes in coverage across time by the ten publishers in terms of political lean and tone. Below are the differences between lean and tone by publishers before and after Trump’s second-term inauguration on immigration:

Average political lean after the 2024 Election until the day before the Inauguration:

Average lean after Trump took office:

In the last two months, Breitbart has consistently written the most articles on immigration (87 articles on immigration this past week alone) and 366 in the last two-and-a-half months. However, it has published more left-leaning articles in the last week than in the period before Trump took office. USA Today has the most noticeable shift in lean, with more right-leaning articles post-inauguration. These shifts in political lean by publisher may be related to coverage of the policy outcomes that followed the implementation of immigration-related executive orders.

And this is the average tone of articles on immigration before the Inauguration:

Average tone after Trump took office:

Following Trump’s inauguration, media coverage has been increasingly negative among left-leaning publishers, including: HuffPost, The Guardian, CNN, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Associated Press articles have become more negative as well, though their positive coverage has only slightly declined over time.

And the outlets that previously had a mix of negative and positive (though still overwhelmingly negative) coverage on immigration but have only published negative articles in the last week are: The Guardian, CNN, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.

Right-leaning (Breitbart and Fox News) coverage on immigration has become slightly more positive following the start of Trump’s second term, as recent policies align with the political stances of these two outlets.

The media’s choice to prioritize immigration over Trump’s pardons parallels a shift in tone as the media is closely following ICE raids and deportations which have taken effect immediately as Trump had promised. Trump’s policies and their impact on immigrants and their families are dominating the political discourse during his first few weeks back at the White House.