Opinion: The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.

[cigaretteman]

By Dana Milbank
Columnist |


December 3, 2021 at 6:48 p.m. EST


A sampling of headlines atop the influential Politico Playbook newsletter over the past month:
“Let the Democratic freakout begin.”
Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
“Dems start to face the hard questions.”
“Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?”
“The other big intra-Democratic fight.”
“No BIF bump for Biden.”
“White House braces for a bad CBO score.”
“ … Biden dithers …”


“Biden tries to calm nerves about 2024.”
“The case for why Biden is screwed.”
Even the extraordinary news that jobless claims had dropped to the lowest level in 52 years came with a qualifier: “BUT, BUT, BUT … don’t expect [the numbers] to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.”
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.


ADVERTISING

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.

After a honeymoon of slightly positive coverage in the first three months of the year, Biden’s press 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.



Think about that. In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.
And yet Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today. Sure, Biden has had his troubles, with the delta variant, Afghanistan and inflation. But the economy is rebounding impressively, he has signed major legislation, and he has restored some measure of decency, calm and respect for democratic institutions.

We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.


Sentiment analysis ranks coverage from entirely negative (-1.0) to entirely positive (1.0), and most outlets are in a relatively tight band between -0.1 and 0.1. Overall, Biden was slightly positive or neutral for seven months, ranging from 0.02 to -0.01. That plummeted to -0.07 in August — a lower number than Trump hit in all of 2020 (or 2019) — and has been between -0.04 and -0.03 ever since. Trump never left a narrow range of -0.03 to -0.04. (The data set doesn’t go far enough back to make a comparison to Trump’s first year in office.)
Also noteworthy: Trump got roughly twice as much coverage in 2020 as Biden has received in 2021. And the coverage of Biden is noticeably more negative than the tone of news coverage overall. Predictably, Breitbart and the New York Post are among the most negative outlets, but even liberal ones such as HuffPost and Salon have been negative. (The Post was the closest to neutral, at 0.0006.)

How to explain why Biden would be treated more harshly than a president who actively subverted democracy? Perhaps journalists, pressured by Trump’s complaints about the press, pulled punches. Perhaps media outlets, after losing the readership and viewership Trump brought, think tough coverage will generate interest.


I suspect my peers across the media have fallen victim to our asymmetric politics. Biden governs under traditional norms, while Republicans run a shocking campaign to delegitimize him with one fabricated charge after another. This week, Republicans threatened a government shutdown to block Biden’s vaccine mandates, after a year of efforts to discourage vaccination. Yet, incredibly, they’re simultaneously blaming Biden for coronavirus deaths — deaths occurring almost entirely among the unvaccinated. “More people have died of covid under President Biden than did in all of 2020,” proclaimed Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), GOP conference chairman.
As Biden might say: C’mon, man.
Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/biden-media-coverage-worse-trump-favorable/

 

[pablow]

For a Russian agent, traitor and a crime family boss who like to be peed on by hookers, Trump was treated very favorable by the MSM.

 

[seminole97]

On the same day, in the same paper, Dana Milbank wrote an editorial, apparently not intended as satire, entitled, “The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.” After listing headlines like “Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?” and “No BIF bump for Biden” as anecdotal evidence of this savagery, Milbank turned to the hard “proof”: data from a company called “FiscalNote.” The firm did a “sentiment analysis” of 200,000 articles and apparently found that “Biden’s press 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.”

I struggle to conceive of the brain that would believe such a thing to be true, but that’s a separate matter. Milbank believed it, and concluded, “My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”

From there, I scrolled in search of the inevitable, “Freedom of the press is good, but” passage. It was three paragraphs down:

We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative…

Five years ago this month, media figures were struggling to process the evidence of limitations on their authority suggested by Donald Trump’s election. Instead of coming to terms with the fact that political moods rise from the ground up, and aren’t dictated by people writing and speaking from places like New York and Washington, colleagues convinced themselves that 2016 was their fault, for not “calling Trump out” enough. The people needed more of their wisdom, not less.

So they doubled and tripled down, soon congratulating themselves for substituting terms like “lie” for “untruth” and “white supremacist” for “racist” or “race-baiting,” and so on. The industry across the next four years then produced a spiraling, awesome mass of the most negative political writing ever penned in English, the op-ed equivalent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It had almost no effect on Trump’s fortunes. If anything, the evidence pointed the other way: if four years of relentless messaging about Trump’s racism had an effect, his gains among every ethnicity except white males in 2020 didn’t seem to show it.

Still, people like Milbank think headlines like “Dems start to face the hard questions” murder democracy, and the Colbert Kings of the world believe reports of Bernie Sanders asking for child care and lower prescription drug prices will Jimmy-Carterize Biden.

The president’s poll numbers are slumping, and the near-universal reaction in Washington has been to assume a disconnect somewhere. Polls also show a 12-point jump in the number of people who feel pessimistic about the economy. How could that be, it is wondered, since the number of jobless claims recently dropped to the lowest levels in 52 years? Answer, according to Milbank: even those numbers were presented to the public in some press reports with BUT BUT BUT qualifiers, telling readers not to expect that they’ll change people’s opinions.

Conventional wisdom says such poll numbers should go up once a major legislative initiative like the infrastructure bill passes. When the numbers didn’t go up enough, the immediate assumption was that the public didn’t hear about the infrastructure bill, or what they heard was insufficiently laudatory. No other explanation was considered.

You know when people feel have negative perceptions of the economy? Usually, when they don’t have enough money. Maybe the jobless claim figures don’t matter as much because the jobs gained aren’t good ones. Or maybe people read the aforementioned Larry Summers saying “a jolt is what is required” to restore “credibility” at the Fed, which would confirm every suspicion ordinary people will have gained from experience in recent decades, i.e. that whenever the economy is allowed to run hot for a while, belt-tightening is eventually called for by “responsible people” to pay for the gains above. It could be they’re guessing what’s coming, and not without reason.

Maybe news doesn’t travel from Washington outward. Maybe it goes the other way, from the real world in, which would make something like listening a better approach than telling. Or is five straight years of getting things wrong not enough? - Matt Tiabbi

 

[ICHawk-I]

Meh, its part of the job; POTUS never going to get universal love. The big different isn't Biden doesn't spend his days crying about how unfairly he's being treated by them.

 

[Titanhawk2]

How many lies, misconceptions, mischaracterizations have been printed about Biden?

 

[Menace Sockeyes]

More that, as Matt Taibbi says, clicks and ratings mean that today’s media is allergic to good news.

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

“More people have died of covid under President Biden than did in all of 2020,” proclaimed Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), GOP conference chairman.

Sometime in the next month or 2 the number of American COVID deaths under Biden will pass the number under Trump.

It won't just be Barrasso trumpeting those numbers and blaming Biden. It will be all Rs, FOX and all the right wing media, and - sad to say - too many in the non-right MSM.

 

[What Would Jesus Do?]

How many lies, misconceptions, mischaracterizations have been printed about Biden?

47,268 as of right now.

 

[RonaldMexico]

Articles like this and responses like WWJDs and Menace’s are why people don’t take progressives seriously. I agree that much of what Trump got, he asked for. But to say that the press treats Biden worse is just comical.

 

[The Tradition]

Post me a quote from any news source that says, "President Biden said, without evidence, that blah, blah, blah...."

I'll wait.

 

[red/green hawk]

By Dana Milbank
Columnist |


December 3, 2021 at 6:48 p.m. EST


A sampling of headlines atop the influential Politico Playbook newsletter over the past month:
“Let the Democratic freakout begin.”
Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.
“Dems start to face the hard questions.”
“Does the WH owe Larry Summers an apology?”
“The other big intra-Democratic fight.”
“No BIF bump for Biden.”
“White House braces for a bad CBO score.”
“ … Biden dithers …”


“Biden tries to calm nerves about 2024.”
“The case for why Biden is screwed.”
Even the extraordinary news that jobless claims had dropped to the lowest level in 52 years came with a qualifier: “BUT, BUT, BUT … don’t expect [the numbers] to immediately change Americans’ negative perceptions of the economy.”
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.


ADVERTISING

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.

After a honeymoon of slightly positive coverage in the first three months of the year, Biden’s press 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.



Think about that. In 2020, Trump presided over a worst-in-world pandemic response that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths; held a superspreader event at the White House and got covid-19 himself; praised QAnon adherents; embraced violent white supremacists; waged a racist campaign against Black Lives Matter demonstrators; attempted to discredit mail-in voting; and refused to accept his defeat in a free and fair election, leading eventually to the violence of Jan. 6 and causing tens of millions to accept the “big lie,” the worst of more than 30,000 he told in office.
And yet Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today. Sure, Biden has had his troubles, with the delta variant, Afghanistan and inflation. But the economy is rebounding impressively, he has signed major legislation, and he has restored some measure of decency, calm and respect for democratic institutions.

We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.


Sentiment analysis ranks coverage from entirely negative (-1.0) to entirely positive (1.0), and most outlets are in a relatively tight band between -0.1 and 0.1. Overall, Biden was slightly positive or neutral for seven months, ranging from 0.02 to -0.01. That plummeted to -0.07 in August — a lower number than Trump hit in all of 2020 (or 2019) — and has been between -0.04 and -0.03 ever since. Trump never left a narrow range of -0.03 to -0.04. (The data set doesn’t go far enough back to make a comparison to Trump’s first year in office.)
Also noteworthy: Trump got roughly twice as much coverage in 2020 as Biden has received in 2021. And the coverage of Biden is noticeably more negative than the tone of news coverage overall. Predictably, Breitbart and the New York Post are among the most negative outlets, but even liberal ones such as HuffPost and Salon have been negative. (The Post was the closest to neutral, at 0.0006.)

How to explain why Biden would be treated more harshly than a president who actively subverted democracy? Perhaps journalists, pressured by Trump’s complaints about the press, pulled punches. Perhaps media outlets, after losing the readership and viewership Trump brought, think tough coverage will generate interest.


I suspect my peers across the media have fallen victim to our asymmetric politics. Biden governs under traditional norms, while Republicans run a shocking campaign to delegitimize him with one fabricated charge after another. This week, Republicans threatened a government shutdown to block Biden’s vaccine mandates, after a year of efforts to discourage vaccination. Yet, incredibly, they’re simultaneously blaming Biden for coronavirus deaths — deaths occurring almost entirely among the unvaccinated. “More people have died of covid under President Biden than did in all of 2020,” proclaimed Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), GOP conference chairman.
As Biden might say: C’mon, man.
Too many journalists are caught in a mindless neutrality between democracy and its saboteurs, between fact and fiction. It’s time to take a stand.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/biden-media-coverage-worse-trump-favorable/

 

[Tom Paris]

How many lies, misconceptions, mischaracterizations have been printed about Biden?

Plenty.

 

[Tom Paris]

Post me a quote from any news source that says, "President Biden said, without evidence, that blah, blah, blah...."

I'll wait.

^^^^^

Believes Trump is just misunderstood and gets picked on.