10/01/2026
📆📰U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in Caracas on Jan. 3. They were then brought to New York, where they face charges related to drug trafficking and other offenses. Our analysts rated media coverage about the military operation in our Topic of the Week.
CBS News and Associated Press provided the most fact-based and balanced coverage from our content set. The AP article focuses on the operation itself, including what steps the military took to secure Maduro and his wife, and the military buildup near Venezuela over the past several weeks. It also looks at what will happen next in Venezuela after President Trump stated that the U.S. will “run” the country, at least temporarily. Analysts found the article to be “simple fact reporting” with a “balanced” bias.
The article from the CBS News website examines Trump’s announcement that U.S. officials will oversee the Venezuelan government for now, and “run it properly,” according to the president. The article includes various comments from Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, other administration officials, and newly sworn-in Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president. The reporting stresses that few details on the future of Venezuela have been given by the Trump administration thus far. Analysts found the article to be a “mix of fact reporting and analysis” with a “balanced” bias, although they noted that no comments from those opposed to Trump’s actions in Venezuela were included.
In an article titled “The Lie of ‘Self-Financing’ Oil Wars,” Mother Jones compares Trump’s actions in Venezuela with U.S. actions in Iraq. The article begins: “The US attack on Venezuela relies on the same deception that justified the war in Iraq: the idea of self-financing wars with oil.” It warns that these actions in Venezuela will likely have “steep costs” — not only the lives lost during the military operation but also the future costs of accessing the oil there. The article notes that U.S. officials “vastly underestimated the cost of fixing Iraq’s oil infrastructure to fund its invasion and occupation,” which ultimately had a price tag of “around $2 trillion.” Analysts categorized the reporting as “analysis” with a “strong left” bias.
The two videos analyzed by our team had similar reliability scores — in the category of “opinion” — and converse bias scores. In a video on the Legal AF YouTube channel, host Michael Popok questions whether the arrests of Maduro and his wife are truly about drug trafficking and narcoterrorism, which is what the indictment states, or about the U.S. desire to take control of Venezuela’s oil reserves. “Is this really about co***ne?” Popok asks, questioning why, then, Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted in a U.S. court for conspiring with drug traffickers to bring hundreds of tons of co***ne into the U.S. Popok is skeptical that Trump, who recently passed his third “dementia test,” or Secretary of State Marco Rubio are the right people to lead another country. Analysts found that the video contains much speculation, and criticism of Trump and his allies, leading to its “skews left” bias rating.
Ben Shapiro, in a video on his YouTube channel, explains the recent history of the Venezuelan government and its oil industry and speculates about the U.S. role in Venezuela moving forward. Regarding the legal ramifications of the U.S. actions to capture Maduro, Shapiro says he doesn’t care “one iota” about international law, because it’s “stupid,” a “lie” and can’t be enforced. As far as domestic law, Shapiro says that Trump is granted the power to order this operation under Article 2 of the Constitution because “sending drugs to the United States acts as an imminent threat.” He argues that while it would be better, from a constitutional perspective, to get congressional approval first, the truth is that U.S. military actions take place without congressional approval “all the time.” Shapiro applauds Trump’s “audacious” action, saying the Iranians, Mexicans, Cubans and Nicaraguans are all now “on notice.” “The credibility of the United States is very, very high right now under President Trump because President Trump has the stones to do the thing,” Shapiro says. The video received a bias rating of “strong right.”
The lowest rated coverage from our content set is an opinion article written by David Marcus on the Fox News website. Marcus writes that the “stunning and perfectly executed operation to seize Maduro” proves that the U.S. is the only remaining superpower, as neither Russia nor China “were able to do anything to protect their close ally Maduro.” He compares the U.S. action in Venezuela to Russia’s failed attempt to seize control of Ukraine and China’s unsuccessful plan to take over Taiwan. “Meanwhile, it took the U.S. all of 25 minutes to wipe Maduro off the board forever.” Marcus poses a question to the American people: “Who do we want running the world?” The United Nations? A trilateral group of Russia, China and the U.S.? “Trump has wisely rejected these cowardly and pie-in-the-sky concepts for a return to good old-fashioned, hard American power setting the guardrails and direction of the globe.” Analysts placed the article in the “selective or incomplete/unfair persuasion” category of reliability because of its speculative statements about Russia and China’s inaction and about international law. The article was found to have a “hyper-partisan right” bias because of its praise of Trump and support of isolationist foreign policy.
