On Sunday’s Find reliable sourcesBrian Stelter of CNN made the absurd claim that media has been tougher on President Biden than on Donald Trump’s predecessor.
Stelter came up with this absurd idea after meeting a Washington Post piece by Dana Milbank, who claimed to have analyzed the “tone” of hundreds of thousands of news articles with artificial intelligence. The analysis concluded that Biden’s media was indeed being harder on him.
Bill Frischling, Vice President FiscalNote, meticulously compiled the findings. These revelations confirmed what I was afraid: Media colleagues are complicit in the killing of democracy.
After three months of a somewhat positive honeymoon, the news coverage has shifted to the second half 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.
Let’s leave aside the notion that harsh coverage of Biden amounts to “the murder of democracy,” and instead talk about Milbank’s conclusion that Biden has been treated at least as harshly as Trump was. A reasonable person would conclude that findings such as these are not in line with reality and either the AI used or the methodology it was being conducted. As they say in statistics, “garbage in, garbage out.”
Stelter is however not compensated to appear reasonable. “What do you think about that?” he asked his audience thoughtfully. “Is that possible? Does it ring true to you?”
Eric Boehlert (Shareblue journalist) was his guest on the segment. A thorough gaslighting of CNN’s audience ensued.
“Do you think the Biden team is right tone out there griping, airing grievances about the press right now?” Stelter inquired.
Boehlert replied: “Oh, sure, and I think it’s long overdue.” He then argued that the press ought to engage in “a little self-reflection,” and declared Milbank’s findings “very convincing.”
He continued:
Trump was a fascist, he was a pathological liar, he’s trying to destroy free and fair elections in this country. Is it any surprise that the conventional, center-left Democrat gets worse media coverage? If I were in the press, I would stop and think, “What are we doing here, and is this all accurate?”
The Media Research Center did its own research and compared coverage on Presidents Trump and Biden. We are back in April, analysts took an exhaustive look at all evening news coverage from the top three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and found that during the first three months of each President’s term, the coverage of Biden was 59% positive, while for Trump it was 89% negative.
While Milbank references this three-month “honeymoon” for Biden in his analysis, he does not seem aware that relative to the rest of Trump’s presidency, those first three months were also something of a honeymoon for him. The coverage on Trump has changed between 2017 and 2021. Negatives between 90% and 92%. Milbank is suggesting that Biden’s current numbers might be as negative for him?
This analysis revealed how many times journalists have compared Biden with Hitler. This analysis took place in 2018 during a 3-day period of cable news. NewsBusters found 22 comparisons of Trump’s border policy to the Holocaust and slavery. Are Biden posting similar figures?
What about how each president covers the border crisis? You can see it for yourself.
We could go one like this, but there’s no point. While the majority of the research covered Trump’s news on TV, it doesn’t mean that the newspaper media was less critical. Milbank’s findings are as much a reflection of reality as a scientific paper concluding that goldfish are more intelligent than dolphins — and that’s obvious to almost everyone. Except for Stelter and Boehlert.
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