Becket Adams: Dana Milbank’s ‘Study’ of Anti-Biden Bias Is Hot Garbage

I Told You So from the Department of I Told You So Washington Examiner media reporter Becket Adams discovered that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank’s “study” comparing Trump coverage to Biden coverage using a computer turned out to be hot garbage, despite being quoted and celebrated on CNN and MSNBC.

Or as Adams put it, “after some additional digging, most notably by Don’t Walk, Run! Productions, which did the lion’s share of assessing FiscalNote’s data, it turns out Milbank’s theory is even flimsier than initially suspected.”

For starters, FiscalNote’s data There were 514 Trump-related articles in the combined CBS News/MSNBC publications last year. The data do not include any Biden-related articles that were published by these networks this year.. Either CBS and MSNBC simply forgot to cover the Biden White House, or FiscalNote omitted both networks’ coverage from its research.

What is the best way to evaluate media coverage about Trump vs. Biden? And then, exclude Biden-related articles at major outlets. The sample included Breitbart as well, which could have a negative impact on Biden’s coverage than those at CBS or MSNBC. 

It was funny how FiscalNote included multiple examples of Raw Transcripts of Biden’s Inaugural Speech , and each received a different “sentiment rating!” Computerized “media analysis” is like love. 

There are multiple duplicates in the data. It is a problem in itself, since duplicate stories naturally affect the weighted medians. But it’s actually worse than that. As it turns out, the “AI” gives different “sentiment” grades to These stories are identical.

An ABC report titled “Biden lands overseas without deal after House delays infrastructure vote” is listed twice in the data spreadsheet. It is ranked at 0.13400 in the data spreadsheet. It’s then ranked at 0.0824 the second time.

The Associated Press article “Pro-Biden groups to spend $100 million on August ad blitz” appears twice. It is ranked at +0.1581 in the initial appearance. It is ranked at +0.1581 the second time it occurs.

 New York Times opinion article titled “Biden Should Finish the Wall” appears on Three separate occasions.

The ratings for this site are: -0.3743, 0.1226 and 0.3136.

Articles that aren’t actually made of metal can still be used. MentionBiden were in some way included in the sampling: 

Also, a number of articles included in the “Articles Analyzed-Biden” data subset have exactly nothing to do with Joe Biden, including an Associated Press report titled “Lee Hart, wife of 1984 presidential hopeful Gary Hart, dies.”

The name “Joe Biden” doesn’t appear even once in the story. Yet, it ranks at -0.3617 on the “sentiment” scale as a negative against the current president.

Adams reported that Trump’s articles were actually out of scope for the 4-month monitoring period. His conclusion: “Put plainly, the data is trash. Milbank is either illiterate or extremely lazy.