Right-Wing Media Is Downplaying The Withheld Trump Accuser Files Scandal
I've been analyzing how right-wing outlets are covering the withheld Trump accuser documents. I found they're avoiding the cover-up question, then ignoring, downplaying, and reframing the development.
Thanks for reading! Consider subscribing to Ground News, which is my partner on this content series. They’re an independent, grassroots media aggregator that pools all the sources for any story into one central hub. More importantly, they tell you the political bias of each news story, the media outlet’s ownership, and their level of factuality, so you can be informed and aware about who is telling you the story and from what angle.
For Ahmed Baba News readers, Ground News is offering a special 40% discount. Use this link and give them a spin: ground.news/ahmed.
This week, a bombshell development sent shockwaves through the political world and overshadowed President Trump’s State of the Union address.
Multiple news outlets have reported that the Justice Department withheld Epstein files related to an allegation that Trump sexually abused a minor. The woman alleged that Trump assaulted her in 1983 when she was around the age of 13 after Epstein introduced her to him.
The FBI interviewed her four times in 2019, but only one of those interviews is in the public database, and that interview does not mention Trump. According to the reporting, the DOJ withheld more than 50 documents related to this accuser’s allegation, including summaries of the three missing FBI interviews.
The missing records were first reported by journalist Roger Sollenberger here on Substack last Friday. He deserves real credit. This week, NPR corroborated and expanded on that reporting, identifying the 3 interviews that were missing and tying the accuser to allegations outlined in a 2025 FBI presentation on the Epstein Files. MS Now subsequently confirmed Sollenberger and NPR’s reporting, and we’ve now seen similar reporting from The New York Times and CNN.
The withholding of these documents compounds the Trump Administration’s two-month-long violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. But it also reveals a potential attempt at a cover-up. This story deserved wall-to-wall coverage, but of course, outlets in Trump-allied right-wing media have either ignored the story or have sought to spin it.
In the first few days of this story, I noticed a near right-wing media blackout on this story, instead focusing on narratives Trump wanted pushed as part of the State of the Union.
While more right-wing outlets are beginning to cover the story, the angles are either framed as either a defense of Trump against the allegations or as giving cover for the DOJ, indicating maybe these documents were “mistakenly withheld.”
In an effort to get a bird’s-eye view to analyze right-wing coverage, I once again used Ground News. It’s a news site and app that analyzes articles from 50,000 news sources daily, tracks their bias, compares headlines, and showcases how each outlet is covering a given story, or if they’re covering it at all. It’s an excellent tool I use and have recommended to students for years in my media literacy and anti-disinformation guest lectures.
Right away, I discovered a significant imbalance in how many right-wing media outlets have decided to cover this. You can see with Ground News’ bias distribution tool that of the 381 news outlets that covered this story, only 41 leaned right:
And when you drill down, you see some of the outlets outright defending Trump.
For example, Breitbart led their coverage of this development not with the cover-up angle, but with an immediate undercutting of the accuser’s allegations.
The DOJ clearly found these allegations credible enough that this accuser was interviewed four separate times. And my main question is, if these allegations are absolutely “false and sensational” as the DOJ claims, then why withhold them? Why specifically withhold documents related to this allegation, and not all the other “salacious” Trump-related allegations in the Epstein file releases? This raises countless questions.
Watching how right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch-owned news outlets covered the story was interesting.
When the Murdoch-owned New York Post and Wall Street Journal finally picked up this story, their angle surrounded the DOJ probing whether these docs were “mistakenly withheld.” Their focus was on trying to give plausible deniability to a potential cover-up, rather than on the allegations themselves.
Ground News shows ownership details, factuality ratings, and where the publications have been ranked on the bias spectrum by third parties. The New York Post and WSJ covered it nearly identically.
Fox News, also owned by the Murdochs, largely ignored this story. I didn’t see any coverage of it anecdotally when I was watching live this week. One of their recent articles on allegations against Trump came on January 30, and their angle was carrying a DOJ narrative that there were no findings of wrongdoing against Trump.
I’ve yet to see an updated piece from them covering the revelation of these withheld FBI interviews. We’ll see if that changes.
Whether these allegations are proven true or not, the question remains: Why did the DOJ withhold these files? Regardless, every day the Trump Administration doesn’t make all Epstein Files public, they remain in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Many questions loom, but one thing is certain: We now know why Trump tried so desperately to prevent the release of the Epstein Files.
This post is powered by Ground News. Like me, Ground News is supported by subscriptions. If you use my link, ground.news/ahmed, you’ll get 40% off your subscription, which is only $5 a month. It’s a great way to support my independent journalism. Ground News is the real deal, and I can’t recommend it enough.
You can use it as a casual news site and get a bird’s eye view of exactly how the biggest stories in politics are being covered, or as an investigative tool to catch disinformation campaigns in real-time.
I’m subscribed to their Vantage plan, which includes the features I used when researching for this piece. It’s been invaluable in helping me to understand the media landscape and quantify how the biggest developments are covered. It also tells you who funds each media organization, so you can make an informed decision about which companies you’re supporting.
I hope you check it out. We have to hold our media to a higher standard, call out false narratives when we see them, and take our media diet into our own hands.
You can find my past pieces where I used Ground News to analyze media coverage below:
Once in a while I turn on Fox or Newsmax just to see if I can stomach the reporting bias and see if things have changed. It’s usually less than 2 minutes before I turn it off. I think we could consider it a form of torture for future incarcerated MAGA? 24 hour news feeds. We can start with BBC and NPR to get them acclimated.