Around lunchtime on Tuesday, President Donald Trump did the same thing he does just about every other day: He shared a stream of social media posts with his nearly 13 million followers.
All of them linked to the same website.
At 12:06 p.m., Trump shared two posts on Truth Social that linked to articles favorable to his agenda, one amplifying claims of voter fraud in California and a second touting the president’s negotiations with Iran. Six minutes later, Trump uploaded a third post, this one applauding the FBI for thwarting an alleged terror attack with “drones and snipers” during last weekend’s Ultimate Fighting Championship cage fights on the White House lawn.
All three posts directed his audience to articles from Just the News, an online media outlet launched by a Trump ally who has been accused of spreading conspiracy theories, biased news and misinformation. Journalist John Solomon, who founded the outlet six years ago and serves as its editor-in-chief, is more than a source of information for Trump.
He could soon land a job at the White House.
For now, he leads a website that, by one measure, is Trump’s favorite source of information. A data analysis by Straight Arrow found that, since he returned to office in January 2025, Trump has directed his social media followers to more articles from Just the News than from any other website.
The analysis offers insight into Trump’s media diet and his role in expanding the reach of a journalist who has been accused by disinformation scholars — and internal Fox News research — of publishing pro-Trump propaganda.
Solomon did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including voicemails left on his cell phone, emails and a message sent via LinkedIn. Neither did the White House.
As a prolific aggregator of news, Trump most regularly shares articles from outlets with institutional biases that align with his administration’s agenda, according to the Straight Arrow analysis. FoxNews.com comes in a close second to Just the News.
The stories that appear on Trump’s feed tend to be hyper partisan with questionable reliability, said Vanessa Otero, the founder and CEO of bias-rating company Ad Fontes Media.
“You can learn a lot about the president’s news consumption habits by what he posts,” Otero told Straight Arrow. Trump doesn’t just post news stories from partisan outlets, she said, “he tends to post the most inflammatory things” they publish.
“You can learn a lot about a person’s worldview if they spend a lot of time consuming content from a particular outlet,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons that we encourage people to read news from a wide variety of sources.”
Inside Trump’s news diet
“Good morning, America, happy Tuesday,” Solomon said this week while kicking off his hour-long newscast, “Just the News, No Noise,” before pivoting to the day’s top story. “This morning, bright and early around 5 o’clock, Just the News broke the story that there was a significant terror attack thwarted by the FBI.”
Solomon, who attended the White House UFC event, noted that his site reported on the story hours before federal law enforcement officials formally filed criminal charges against the alleged perpetrators. By that afternoon, Solomon’s story — like many others he publishes — had made its way onto Trump’s Truth Social feed.
Between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, and June 16, 2026, he has posted more than 9,300 times to Truth Social, according to Straight Arrow’s analysis of the president’s feed. The analysis is based on a continuously updated archive of Trump’s Truth Social posts by Matt Stiles, a senior data and graphics editor at CNN. The tool automatically scrapes Trump’s Truth Social posts every five minutes.
Straight Arrow analyzed Trump’s Truth Social archive using the Python computer programming language to extract URLs from his posts and quantify how frequently news website domains appeared on his feed.
Trump cited Just the News more than 220 times during that period, the analysis found — more than any other media outlet. Just the News citations peaked in April, when Trump shared articles from the website more than once per day, on average.
Trump is known to be an avid watcher of television news, and his feed routinely posted video clips from Fox News, many of them from hosts of the network’s opinion shows like Sean Hannity. The Straight Arrow analysis focused specifically on Truth Social posts from the president that linked out to external, text-based articles.
Since Trump’s inauguration, articles from FoxNews.com have made 208 appearances on the president’s social media feed — just shy of those from Just the News. If FoxBusiness.com and Hannity.com are added to the mix, along with video clips from TV segments, Fox News takes the lead.
No other news outlet comes close, according to the Straight Arrow analysis.
Since the start of his second term, through June 16, Trump has shared 125 New York Post articles and 99 from Breitbart. Each of the 10 news websites that appear most often on Trump’s newsfeed has received a “leans right” or “right” rating from AllSides, a for-profit media-bias rating firm.
And their veracity has sometimes been called into question.
Does Just the News offer just the news?
The credibility of Solomon and Just the News depends on who one asks.
On its website, Just the News says it is committed to “reporting facts from journalists with a long record of public trust and excellence.”
Before launching Just the News, Solomon had a lengthy investigative journalism career for mainstream outlets, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post and, more recently, The Hill. Yet, for more than a decade, he has faced accusations of a rightward slant and “bending the truth.” In a 2012 article, the Columbia Journalism Review concluded that Solomon was “notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.”
His critics have called into question the accuracy and sourcing in his articles. Among them are stories reporting on supposed election interference by Ukraine to undermine Trump’s first presidential campaign and reporting that sought to discredit allegations that Trump’s campaign conspired with Russians in 2016 to gain an advantage against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, The Hill launched a review of Solomon’s opinion columns about Ukraine after his work faced criticism from State Department diplomats during Trump’s impeachment hearings before the House of Representatives. After a five-month investigation, the publication determined Solomon failed to distinguish between news and opinion articles and failed to disclose conflicts of interest to readers. The Hill did not retract the columns, but added editor’s notes questioning the credibility of some of Solomon’s sources and of the information they provided. Trump had pointed to Solomon’s work in his defense against impeachment.
Solomon’s Ukraine columns led the left-leaning journalism watchdog Media Matters for America to bestow him with an award no journalist wants: Misinformer of the Year.
“All sorts of frauds, miscreants, liars, grifters and charlatans are drawn to right-wing media,” Media Matters wrote in 2019. “Even amid such a wretched group, it stands out when multiple witnesses testify to Congress that a conservative columnist colluded with agents of the president to advance a fabricated story intended to blow up an entire presidential election.”
How fact-checkers evaluate Just the News
Media Bias/Fact Check, a media watchdog founded by attorney Dave Van Zandt, identifies Just the News as a “questionable source,” a designation given to outlets that exhibit “extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency, and/or is fake news.” The organization defines “fake news” as a “deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for profit or influence.”
Though headlines on Just the News “typically do not utilize emotional language,” story selection skews in favor of Trump and against Democrats, Media Bias/Fact Check said. Despite having “low credibility” according to the fact-checking group, the site has “high traffic,” undeniably boosted by the president.
The bias-rating company Ad Fontes Media, meanwhile, says that Just the News “skews Right” but is “generally reliable.” The company’s ratings are based on panels made up of analysts who identify as politically liberal, conservative and moderate. Bias scores are based on language, political positioning and comparisons to other news outlets.
Otero, the Ad Fontes CEO, said Just the News articles exhibit a wide range in reliability and bias. In fact, she said, partisan websites routinely publish a mix of stories that offer “perfectly good reporting” alongside partisan articles that have gone “completely off the rails.”
She called it a “propaganda technique” that partisan publishers use to push narratives while maintaining credibility with readers. The technique appears to be part of the business model at Just the News, she said.
Moderators with AllSides concluded that Just the News “leans right,” alongside outlets like The Free Press and the National Review. That places the site more to the center than Fox News and Breitbart. Reviewers determined the site features “bias by omission” and commentary “primarily from right-leaning perspectives.”
Julie Mastrine, the director of marketing and media bias ratings at AllSides, said the company doesn’t offer a reliability rating because “we don’t want to tell Americans what to think” and that its bipartisan moderators are “not arbiters of truth.”
Mastrine said the AllSides rating is based on a content review of Just the News, not of its leadership. But she acknowledged the site features a “right-wing bent” and that a future review could indicate “they’ve moved further right since we looked at them last” in 2024.
Meanwhile, she said it’s not surprising that Trump primarily shares articles from conservative outlets. As a news aggregator, she said, the president’s feed could offer a counterbalance to curation services from technology companies.
“Apple News, Google News, they’re trying to serve a broad range of Americans and they mostly curate from the left,” she told Straight Arrow. “So is that a problem? We think it is.”
Solomon’s pitch to the White House
Within right-wing media circles, Solomon is viewed as an icon. Grant Stinchfield, a host with the conservative streaming platform Real America’s Voice, said in an email that Solomon is unlike other reporters because he “loves America and despises waste fraud and abuse.”
Stinchfield told Straight Arrow that Trump appreciates stories from Just the News because the website goes to great lengths to “expose the bad actors in Washington.”
“No one has covered the weaponization of government against conservatives like John has,” he said. “His sources in the highest levels of government are unmatched.”
Soon, Solomon could have more than sourcing in government — he could have a new job.
In April, Solomon told The New York Times he was being vetted for a short-term White House gig as a special government employee. An anonymous Trump administration official told The Times that Solomon could be tapped to lead a “transparency” task force focused on records related to Russian election interference and cybersecurity concerns involving China.
“It’s an honor to be considered,” Solomon told the newspaper while declining to elaborate on the specifics.
As a media figure turned Trump administration official, Solomon would find himself in good company. Otero noted that Trump routinely taps media personalities he likes for government roles, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Often, she said, Trump surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear.
“The primary voices that he listens to regarding politics, and the connections that he has, are in the content creation and media space rather than other talent pipelines,” like previous government experience, Otero told Straight Arrow. “He’s picked folks for positions in his government and for advisory roles that are specifically from very low-reliability, highly biased content outlets.”
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