Dana Milbank Proves Biden Coverage Is As Negative As Trump's

[babylonsister]

https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/dana-milbank-proves-biden-coverage

Dana Milbank Proves Biden Coverage Is As Negative As Trump's
And of course, some media types are insisting it's not true.
By Susie Madrak — December 6, 2021


See, this story alone proves why you should support our fund drive. Because media bias is such an insidious thing, and it's sites like ours that keep it front and center.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who's really done some great work during the Trump era, wrote a column this weekend that really shouldn't be controversial -- but it is. His fellow journalists are pulling the wagons in a circle and insisting it's not true.

It isn’t just Politico. My impression of other outlets’ coverage of President Biden had been much the same: unrelentingly negative. Was it my imagination?

No, it wasn’t.

Artificial intelligence can now measure the negativity with precision. At my request, Forge.ai, a data analytics unit of the information company FiscalNote, combed through more than 200,000 articles — tens of millions of words — from 65 news websites (newspapers, network and cable news, political publications, news wires and more) to do a “sentiment analysis” of coverage. Using algorithms that give weight to certain adjectives based on their placement in the story, it rated the coverage Biden received in the first 11 months of 2021 and the coverage President Donald Trump got in the first 11 months of 2020.

The findings, painstakingly assembled by FiscalNote vice president Bill Frischling, confirmed my fear: My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.

Yep. Turns out, Biden’s press coverage for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.

Let that sink in. Joe Biden is being treated the same as Trump, whose criminal behavior was a daily occurrence in plain view.

Politico's Ryan Lizza played defense:

Not sure why @ryanlizza is bragging about Politico being “neutral” between democracy and authoritarianism, between truth and lies. (1) https://t.co/A9As0Zb6zv

— Dana Milbank (@Milbank) December 5, 2021

Twitter denizens like Dan Froomkin and Margaret Sullivan sided with Milbank:

It’s not just @Milbank’s *opinion* … He’s got the numbers https://t.co/z3K7e6v7HV pic.twitter.com/XAUcSnUy8J

— 💫 Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) December 4, 2021

The most important part in examining media bias is story selection. What they cover and, more importantly, what they choose to ignore

— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) December 4, 2021

Now, bloggers knew from the very beginning not to trust Politico. (I still remember their sad little booth at a D.C. conference where they were trying to sign people up.) And to this day, I still cringe when I have to cite them for a story.

But as Milbank points out in his piece, none of the major publications get bragging rights when it comes to Biden coverage. So no, you're not crazy, they really are trying to create false equivalency between Biden and the fascist. And as we know, people care about what the media tells them to care about.

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[mn9driver]

2. The past 4 months are post Afghanistan withdrawal. The owners of the media have no current war

to profit from. This makes them very unhappy, and I believe it affects how Biden is covered.

[halfulglas]

10. Let's not forget, CNN made it's bones and reaped HUGE financial rewards

On its coverage of the Gulf War. The 90s coverage of Bosnia, etc. Nobody had seen anything like it before. So now all the cables know war and conflict mean viewer eyes and profit. Reality TV at its "finest."

[Alexander Of Assyria]

12. Yes, sir. Now with now more Afghanistan the corporate media are frantically looking for another

war, faux or not, to ratchet up fear in America of…the foreigner, even if oceans apart.

[panader0]

3. I watched that.

It's past time this inane and irresponsible media response to Biden got called out.
Biden isn't just a thousand times better than tfg, he's in a whole different level.

[PatSeg]

4. That is truly disturbing

I knew the media tended toward the negative, but I had no idea it was as bad with Biden as with Trump.

[PatSeg]

5. I found this Tweet rather revealing

Link to tweet

?s=20

[Farmer-Rick]

6. The media is owned by the filthy rich

The filthy rich are a bit afraid that Democrats and Biden may take away a little bit of their stolen loot.

Better to have a disgusting pig like Trump as an authoritarian dictator then to give up 2 cents in taxes or government contract kick backs.

It's just the filthy rich protecting their pig trough.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

14. Yes. Don't forget the sweet power that comes along with every increase in their richness.

[Klaralven]

7. The press think their role is questioner, critic, investigator, gadfly, muckraker, ...

They are just doing what they think their job is.

[SouthBayDem]

8. Exactly, they're not here to be a marketing agency for one party nt

[Alexander Of Assyria]

15. Except where one party is fascist, otherwise you are correct.

[whathehell]

19. I disagree.

Any attempt, or perhaps I should say "corporate mandate" to cover Biden in as negative a fashion as Trump, constitutes a serious and deliberate distortion of events.

[Mary in S. Carolina]

9. The media's major shareholders for OAN, FAUX News, CNN, MSNBC, HULU and YouTube TV

is Vanguard and Blackrock (Vanguard is major Shareholder in Blackrock). They control the media and the heads of Blackrock give millions and millions to the Republican party. There needs to be antitrust laws against intuitional shareholders.

[msfiddlestix]

13. This 10,000 %

Thank you for bringing these vitally important facts into direct focus.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

11. Corporate for the rich media is consistent, both sides equally covered...nothings changed, even

when the other side are fascist, racists, seditionists, liars, cheats and proven criminals. So nothing ever new under the sun in their corporate media universe.

It’s an addiction stronger than crack.

[msfiddlestix]

16. thank you so much babylonsister.. this report is VITALLY important.

Keep this discussion front and center and maybe, just maybe, we can bring some measure of awareness and perhaps, just perhaps, some measure of change.

Not holding my breath, but one can hope and keep trying.

[cstanleytech]

17. Biggest problem is most of our news media has consolidated under the control of a handful of people.

[CousinIT]

18. More...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216112946

As for goddamned Politico it was bought out by a German version of Rupert Murdoch named Axel Springer: https://www.nationalmemo.com/politico-axel-springer

[Wingus Dingus]

20. It's worrisome to me. It's not 2007 again. There's no "both sides" anymore.

Democrats are the last Americans.

[Lonestarblue]

21. I wish Milbank had examined media coverage of Trump during his first 11 months in office

with Biden’s first 11 months in office. That would be interesting to see because I think it would show just how positively the media treated Trump for more than a year. They breathlessly reported his every tweet and seldom bothered reporting the lies until much later. By 2020 after the pandemic had started, the media had become more negative about Trump because of his utter failures in addressing the virus.

[LiberalFighter]

22. Especially when they provide excessive coverage of Manchin and Sinema.

Also excessive coverage of disputes that are not relevant.

[tiredtoo]

23. Interesting point

Currently MSNBC is showing a negative story re Biden. What is he doing about gun violence?

[ancianita]

24. Yes,

because when gun violence broke records in 2020, no one -- no media -- were asking what Trump was doing about gun violence, were they. No, they weren't.