How Different Sides Covered the Turkey F-35 Story

This is a new format for PoliTalking: a comparison of how outlets across the political spectrum covered a single story. Category placements follow our curated guide to news sources across the spectrum. The goal is not to declare a winner, but to make framing differences visible so you can read any single outlet with better context.

The Story in Brief

At the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 to 8, President Trump said he would “certainly consider” selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey and announced that the United States would lift sanctions imposed on Turkey in 2020 over its purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system. Turkey was expelled from the F-35 program in 2019, and Section 1245 of the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act bars any transfer unless the administration certifies Turkey no longer possesses the S-400. No certification has been made, and Turkey has not given up the system. A bipartisan group of House members, the Israeli government, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board all publicly opposed the move. By the summit’s end, Trump said no final decision had been made. Our full News post on the story is here.

Those baseline facts appear in coverage across the spectrum. What differs is emphasis, word choice, and what gets left out.

Wire Services and Straight News

Straight-news coverage led with the announcement itself and foregrounded the legal obstacle. Defense News, carrying Reuters reporting, noted in its opening paragraphs that Trump did not explain how a sale would proceed given existing law. PBS NewsHour paired the announcement with the summit context, including Trump’s criticism of NATO allies over Iran. The Hill framed the story around the coming institutional conflict, describing Trump as setting up a fight with Congress. The common thread: the statutory barrier is treated as the story’s central tension, and both the administration’s position and Congressional objections are quoted.

Liberal / Center-Left

Center-left outlets emphasized the relationship between the two leaders and cast the announcement as personal favor-trading. The Washington Post’s lead described Trump heaping praise on Erdogan while stopping short of granting what Erdogan wants most, a framing that centers the personal dynamic rather than the policy. Further left on the liberal spectrum, The New Republic ran the story under a headline calling the move a massive gift to Turkey “and Russia,” treating the S-400 intelligence risk as a foregone conclusion rather than a contested assessment. Democratic lawmakers’ descriptions of Erdogan as an authoritarian being rewarded while democratic allies are berated, such as Rep. Frank Pallone’s widely quoted post, featured more prominently in this coverage than in straight-news accounts.

Progressive Left

Here the most notable finding is volume. As of this writing, we found little dedicated coverage of the F-35 question from the progressive-left outlets on our source list, such as Jacobin, Mother Jones, or The Intercept. We cannot rule out coverage we missed, but the story does not appear to have been a priority. Democracy Now! included the summit in its headline roundups while giving fuller treatment to other stories, including ICE enforcement and the Iran ceasefire. This is consistent with a broader pattern: the progressive left tends to cover arms sales as a systemic critique of the weapons industry rather than as a legal dispute between a president and Congress, and a story whose loudest critics are Republican members of Congress, the WSJ editorial board, and the Israeli government maps poorly onto that frame. The omission is itself informative: which stories a camp treats as urgent tells you as much as how it frames the ones it covers.

Traditional Conservative

This is the story’s most interesting category, because the traditional-conservative press largely opposed a Republican president. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argued the sale should be a nonstarter while Turkey owns the S-400, warning that operating the two systems together would effectively let Russia study the free world’s premier fighter, and adding that Congress would not like the sale. Policy-adjacent conservative and hawkish outlets, including JINSA and FDD, published detailed legal arguments that Section 1245 leaves no discretionary path around certification. The framing here is not anti-Trump so much as institutionalist: the law binds the executive, alliances require trust, and Erdogan has not earned it. Readers who assume the right moves in lockstep with the White House would not predict this coverage.

Populist Right

Populist-right coverage was the most favorable to the administration, though not uniformly promotional. Breitbart’s summit coverage attributed the original problem to the Obama administration’s refusal to sell Turkey American missile defenses, a causal framing largely absent elsewhere, and presented Trump’s warmth toward Ankara as a strategic pivot away from what it called ineffective European allies toward capable Middle Eastern partners. Notably, Breitbart’s own reporting acknowledged the counterargument that Russian engineers might learn too much about the F-35, and its end-of-summit piece plainly stated that reversing the ban could face opposition in Congress. Fox News gave prominent placement to Trump’s “we don’t sanction friends” line while also reporting lawmakers’ concerns about the S-400, Hamas, and tensions with Greece and Cyprus. The distinguishing feature of this category was less the omission of counterarguments than the ordering: loyalty and dealmaking first, legal obstacles second.

What the Comparison Shows

Three observations, offered as analysis rather than verdict. First, the basic facts were consistent across every category we reviewed; this was a framing story, not a factual dispute. Second, the sharpest opposition came from the traditional-conservative press and bipartisan members of Congress, not from the left, which scrambles the usual assumption that criticism of a president maps onto the opposing party’s media. Third, the clearest partisan signal was in story selection: the progressive left largely looked elsewhere, while outlets across the center and right treated it as a major story. Readers who want the fullest picture of this story would do well pairing a straight-news account with the WSJ editorial position and one populist-right report, an unusual combination that reflects an unusual story.

Discussion Questions

Do you usually read news from one outlet or several? Has that changed over time?
Which of the five framings described here is closest to how you first heard about this story?
Were you surprised that the strongest opposition came from conservative outlets rather than the left?
Breitbart traced the problem back to the Obama administration. Does where a story “starts” change how readers judge it?
Is leaving a story uncovered a form of bias, or just a difference in priorities?
Why might a president’s personal relationship with a foreign leader get more attention at some outlets than the underlying law?
What does this story suggest about the assumption that media divides cleanly along party lines?
How could a reader detect framing differences on their own without a comparison like this one?
Should news outlets tell readers how they choose which stories to cover?
Imagine you are an editor at an outlet in one of these five categories. How would you have assigned this story?

Across the Spectrum: How Different Sides Covered Trump’s F-35 Opening to Turkey