Early this month, the Washington Post’s very own one-man Fifth Column, Dana Milbank, posted a Babylon Bee-worthy op-ed headlined The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof. This was not an empirical exercise. It was complete chaos. The only thing it proved was that if you start out with the answer, you can work backward to find “data” to support that answer. Mike Miller (my colleague) posted about the debacle here: Trump goes Trump on ridiculous claim that media is harder on Joe Biden.
Milbank’s satire focused on the absurd claim that Joe Biden was the victim of negative press coverage. However, it is said that the leitmotif was hidden. This is from The New Republic, a formerly credible site that now drifts between “joke” and “irrelevant,” Is Criticizing Joe Biden a Danger to Democracy?
Over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made considerable waves with a column that rather lustily accused the media of offering President Biden worse coverage than President Trump. At first blush, this might seem impossible, if only because Trump’s actions—through corruption, incompetence, and the need to constantly battle the media—made it almost impossible to cover him favorably. Milbank, however, marshaled some statistics from data analytics experts, who combed through hundreds of thousands of articles to provide a detailed “sentiment analysis” supporting his thesis 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.”
But Milbank’s most provocative idea posited that the media needed to be “partisan” in the service of 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.”
Milbank was less concerned with the nature of Biden’s coverage than he was that the media were not openly allied with Biden. Milbank’s claim that the media was more than a DNC wing is likely to shock anyone who doesn’t live in the same world as me.
Milbank elaborated more on the thesis in this interview by Dan Froomkin. Milbank went from writing for The Washington Post to swinging big at them.
“I don’t think anything in our training or experience as journalists prepared us for a moment in which one of the two major political parties is no longer cooperating with the democratic process: promulgating the most outrageous lies, disenfranchising voters and giving state legislatures the ability to overturn unfavorable election results, openly embracing white nationalism,” Milbank said.
Not knowing any other way to write about politics, “they’re doing the normal thing,” he said.
But Milbank’s view is that “It can’t be said too many time that this is not normal… I think we need a rethink entirely how we do things.”
(Here are my thoughts on that very topic: “Press Watch mission statement: Political journalism needs a reset.”)
“The old methods of back and forth just don’t apply,” he said. “There was a time when both sides had claim to the truth — they were just on different sides on the issues. It is a different world now, where the majority of time one side operates from fiction. It’s not just fairy tale fiction. It’s very corrosive and damaging fiction,” he said.
“I don’t think it is hyperbolic to say that we are in this existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and between fact and fiction, and we should not be on the sidelines of those,” Milbank said.
If I worked for a “news” organization that won a Pulitzer Prize for pushing the Russia Hoax and has editorialized in favor of punishing people who refuse the COViD vaccine, I might just STFU instead of opining about “democracy” and “authoritarianism.” That’s just me, though.
Rush Limbaugh once said, “If you listen to them, they’ll tell you what their up to.” If you are watching the massive loosening of bowels on the political left over an epic trolling of Joey SoftServe on Christmas Eve, you can see that these people have read and internalized Milbank’s missive.
As you recall, on Christmas Eve, as NORAD was tracking a fully masked Santa Claus, this exchange happened between a caller and Joe Biden.
Here is our coverage of this nothingburger: Media Melts Down Over ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ Troll of Biden, as Left Targets the Caller, Dad Who Pranked Biden With ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ Now Being Threatened, and Man Who Got Joe Biden to Say ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ Speaks out as the Meltdown Continues. It should have been nothingburger. The media responded as though Bernie Bro, a mad Bernie Bro, had attempted to destroy the House GOP caucus at Baseball practice or that a racist had driven through Christmas Parade in his car. Well, that’s not true. These events were not covered by mainstream media. (My colleague Jeff Charles nails the hypocrisy here Leftist Outrage Over ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ Dad Is the Fakest of Fake Fakery.) But now CNN is calling “Let’s Go, Brandon” a sign of an insurgency in the making, see CNN Now Attacking the Dad Who Trolled Biden With Bizarre Claim.
They are reacting exactly as if they answered “yes” to the rhetorical question posed by The New Republic, that is, criticizing Joe Biden is a danger to democracy.
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