Jack Smith spent a day in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, and depending on which outlets you read, you came away with one of two entirely different stories.
If your feed leans left, the hearing was about a Republican senator who tried to catch the former special counsel in a lie and instead tripped over his own facts. If your feed leans right, the hearing was about a subpoena that swept up the communications data of roughly 50 journalists. Both things happened. The interesting part is that almost no single outlet led with both.
This is one of the cleaner examples we've seen recently of how source selection quietly rewrites a story, so it's worth walking through slowly.
What actually happened at the hearing
The verifiable core, drawn from coverage across the spectrum, is straightforward. Former special counsel Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, defending the two criminal indictments he brought against President Trump — one tied to the January 6 Capitol attack, one tied to classified documents. Republican senators worked to portray the investigation as politically motivated.
Two threads emerged from the day. First, Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri tried to set a perjury trap by pressing Smith about communications with the Atlanta Hawks — apparently meaning to reference the Iowa Hawkeyes. Smith had no such communications, and the line of attack collapsed in public. Second, reporting surfaced that Smith's investigators had subpoenaed communications data from about 50 journalists at more than a dozen news organizations during the probe. Separately, The Atlantic reported that the Justice Department's own counter-investigation into an alleged anti-Trump conspiracy inside the FBI is struggling under staff turnover and evidentiary problems.
Seven outlets covered the hearing. You can see the full spread of coverage on the story page. What separated them was not the facts. It was which fact went in the headline.
The left-leaning lede: a senator's blunder
Left-leaning outlets made Schmitt's mistake the story. The New York Times ran the subhead "A Republican eager to prove the former special counsel was dishonest appeared to instead demonstrate his own confusion over basic facts." CNN published a standalone piece on the "new details on GOP Senator's basketball blunder." The Associated Press — a wire service, and normally the most restrained voice in any room — filed its own dispatch on the Hawks-versus-Hawkeyes mix-up.
That framing is accurate as far as it goes. Schmitt did confuse the mascots, and the perjury gambit did fall apart. But across those three outlets, the subpoena of nearly 50 journalists' communications data received no prominent treatment. The hearing's most durable First Amendment question was left in the margin — a textbook case of burying the lede, where the more consequential fact sits three paragraphs down while the more entertaining one leads.
The right-leaning lede: the journalist subpoenas
Right-leaning outlets inverted the priority. The Daily Signal reported that Smith's investigators had obtained phone and communications data from journalists at more than a dozen outlets, quoting critics who called it a "massive First Amendment breach." The Blaze framed the entire hearing through what it called Smith's "Trump dragnet," describing him as "the Biden regime's former special counsel" and citing records surfaced by the Oversight Project.
Both outlets treated the journalist subpoenas as the central revelation of the week — and on the merits, a subpoena reaching 50 reporters is a real story that deserves scrutiny. But neither gave meaningful space to the Schmitt episode that dominated the other half of the spectrum, and both wrapped the reporting in loaded verbs. "Dragnet" and "regime" are not neutral descriptors; they tell you how to feel before you've finished the sentence.
Same testimony, two acts of omission
Set the two versions side by side and the pattern is symmetrical in shape, if not in tone. Each side reported something true and each side quietly dropped something the other side found essential. That's bias by omission working in both directions at once — not invented facts, just a selective spotlight.
It's worth being precise about which omission carries more weight. A senator confusing two sports teams is embarrassing and briefly funny; it changes nothing about the underlying case. A subpoena of dozens of journalists' records touches press freedom directly and outlasts the news cycle. On that measure, the outlets with the widest reach chose the lighter story. The outlets that led with the heavier one, meanwhile, coated it in language that made it easy for half the audience to dismiss.
There's also a volume asymmetry here that's easy to miss if you only read one feed. Three left-leaning outlets ran the blunder angle; the subpoena story surfaced in a smaller set of right-leaning outlets. If you counted articles instead of reading them, you might conclude the blunder was simply the bigger news — which is exactly why the raw source count matters less than what each source actually said.
How to read a hearing like this yourself
You don't need a media studies degree to catch this. Two habits do most of the work.
First, separate the checkable facts from the framing verbs. Schmitt confused the Hawks and the Hawkeyes — checkable. Investigators subpoenaed reporters' data — checkable. "Dragnet," "blunder," "breach," "regime" — those are editorial choices layered on top. When you strip the verbs out, the two stories stop looking like different events.
Second, read at least one outlet from each side of any story you actually care about, and notice what's missing from each rather than only what's present. The fastest way to do that is to put the coverage next to itself. Our side-by-side compare tool lines up how different outlets handled the same event, so the gaps become obvious instead of invisible.
How does media framing affect public perception?
This is the whole game. Both ledes about the Smith hearing were factually defensible. But a reader who saw only the blunder framing walks away thinking the hearing embarrassed Republicans and vindicated the investigation. A reader who saw only the subpoena framing walks away thinking the hearing exposed a press-freedom scandal and confirmed the probe's overreach. Same day, same witness, same committee room — two audiences with two incompatible memories of it.
Framing doesn't lie to you. It just decides what you'll remember. The defense isn't cynicism about every outlet; it's the small, repeatable habit of reading across the spectrum and asking, each time, what the other side put in the headline that yours left out.