Opinion: The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.
This article has a couple of the most important passages you will see in an oped column this year, or any year.
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.
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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.
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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.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Opinion: The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.
A sampling of headlines atop the influential Politico Playbook newsletter over the past month:
“Let the Democratic freakout begin.”
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“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.
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.
Thefindings, 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;embracedviolent 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 ofmore than 30,000he 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 forcoronavirusdeaths — deaths occurring almost entirely among the unvaccinated. “More people have died of covid under President Biden than did in all of 2020,”proclaimedSen. 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.
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This is an admonishment that not only applies to journalists, it applies to everyone, including some people on Newstalkers. Is this country going to wake up to what is going on?
The left biased lamestream media Washington Post opinion was not only wrong but stupidly so.
ANY COMMENT ADDRESSED TO JOHN RUSSELL AND NOT THE SEEDED ARTICLE WILL BE FLAGGED AS OFF TOPIC
ANY COMMENT CONTAINING THE PHRASE TDS WILL BE FLAGGED AS OFF TOPIC
You should put that in red and bold it
Wake up to what? So what's going on, some kind of media conspiracy?
Biden is so bad that even the leftist supportive media is calling him out now and asking the hard questions.
It's about time.
Pure bullshit..............................
IMO, honest coverage will generate interest. Maybe some people are tired of tuning in to the likes of Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon judging them when the have their own closets to clean out!
For those who rely on alt-right wing sources? That's a hoot!
Are the headlines and stories inaccurate? Is the press making the news - or - is the press reporting the news made by Democrats?
Claiming that the press treated Trump kindly seems extraordinarily myopic. And more press coverage of Trump shouldn't be surprising since Trump was tweeting, making statements, and available to the press far, far more often than has been Biden. Trump spoke directly to the press and public; Biden is being filtered through press secretaries and surrogate spokes people.
The 'partisans for democracy' agitprop is really a demand that the press become the propaganda arm of the Biden administration. But Biden can address that by making himself more available to the press. Biden can tell his own story just as Trump did.
I tend to agree, as would most of the known world!
All that noise trmp made on social media wasn't about making himself accessible to the press. It was all about gaining attention. It was the classic move made by petulant toddlers who sense the attention shifting somewhere else.
And it wasn't like he answered questions when he was in front of the press. He shouted out stupid, inane, and offensive things designed to send the reporters scurrying to be the first to write the headline "Donald Trump Said Something Offensive!"
As you point out, the press was not friendly towards Trump. And Trump bypassed the press on Twitter, didn't he?
Trump ran against the status quo. And an unfriendly press validated Trump's politics of fighting the establishment.
Biden ran on reestablishing and revitalizing the status quo. Biden's promise was to bring back the normalcy of the establishment. Any negative press coverage undermines Biden's politics of reinvigorating the establishment. And Biden cannot attack the establishment he promised to defend.
All you Dems should get on Twitter and shout "fake news!" until it's once again lost meaning. (shrug) It worked for Trumpublicans...
Your other choice is to push the whole Biden Admin to do better.
Every single one of the people who has replied to this article so far has missed the point.
Maybe they only read the headline. (When we have to use the headline supplied by the source this is what can happen).
They don't respond to the points of the article, they only respond to the headlines. They have knee jerk reactions and immediately fall back to unsupported talking points and right wing propaganda.
I think this paragraph sums up the author's point:
It's too bad the data set doesn't go back far enough, tho.
If they are missing the point, it is because the author misses on the real issue at hand.
The only thing I agree with, but I have to concur in the result only, not the reasoning.
Did he expect glowingly positive media attention? Biden ate a foreign object off of his chin, during a live broadcast. The guy's a racist, imbecilic liar, that is far beyond his time. The media spent the entire election process coddling him, and allowing him to dodge any meaningful coverage. The press pampered this buffoon, while he made lofty promises that were sold wholesale by the assclowns giving him a free pass. What we are seeing is buyer's remorse, or an attempt to salvage what, if any, integrity the media has left. Biden is the product of media bias, and they are attempting to distance themselves from him.
When you claim the previous guy handled something terribly, and that you are going to stamp it out altogether...you might expect that people want you to at least have better numbers than the guy you claim did a terrible job.
His peers have fallen victim to asymmetric coverage of the political arena, and this guy is attempting to perpetuate that. Traditional norms? Yes, packing the SCOTUS is a long held tradition. I can't believe Biden's blathering about that wasn't better received. Flip-flopping on a mandate, then using a federal regulatory agency rule to implement such a mandate...very traditional. Fabricated charges? See Ronin's humble list at 3.1. The media's willingness to lay with liberals, on everything, is biting them in the ass, and they are finally witnessing enough of the public calling bullshit to attempt a different tune. The only thing that remains to be seen is how long their new found taste for bipartisan coverage lasts. My guess is it passes after the next election cycle.
They're running scared of the conservative media such as Breitbart, NY Post, and OAN, but most especially Fox News. And with all the noise trmp make about fake news, they have started to believe the bullshit the con media has spurted out
I think they were just scared of the sociopath.
There has never been a "left wing" bias, it has always been biased in favor of Republicans ever since Nixon. Even during Watergate the spin was always the right wing effort to diminish what Nixon and his cohorts did.
The right wing has so many powerful corporate media interests backing them like Fox. Fox claims the mantel of "the most powerful name in news" and right wingers constantly tout the viewership of Fox as superiority. Fox puts right wing talking head pundits out there as "news" when it is NOT news to spew right wing talking points.
Fox is a CORPORATION and so is SINCLAIR, and so is all the Corporate Radio and right wing print media.
There are so many right wing radio hosts, although they lost quite a few to Covid. There is still no shortage of powerful right wing corporate media in radio and other venues that all spew the exact same talking points over and over and over just for the money.
Fox doesn't even believe it's own lies, they demand vaccines and testing for their employees while these same people are on the airwaves daily spewing lies and misinformation to the gullible right wing who lap it up like milk and honey.
Wanna go on a Snipe hunt?
Lots of trophy Snipe up here in northern Michigan.
The point of the article, and I know it is the point because the author Dana Millbank was on television yesterday talking about it, is that the media sets up the "both sides" scenario where we are led to believe that what is "wrong" with Biden is just as serious and just as critical as what is wrong with Trump and the Republicans. That is false and on the way to being disastrous for our country. That is exactly what Millbank is saying.
Biden wants to spend money to improve the lives of working people. Trump and the Republicans want to steal future elections and are already laying the groundwork to do so.
They are not the same thing and the media needs to come down hard on the side of democracy.
So I missed the point, too? I read the article, John. Granted I'm not particularity good at analysis of written words but I didn't see anything about the "both sides" argument.
The purpose of this article is not to have people debate the pros and cons of Joe Bidens presidency, it is not that at all.
That is actually what the writer is warning about.
In the excerpt you provide, he is arguing the pros and cons. What you, and the author, are attempting to do is claim that republicans are themselves the cons, and Biden and his liberal friends are the pros. Authoritarian? My friend, nothing says authoritarian like a reach-around mandate, increased taxes, etc. Nobody disagrees that the author does not want to focus on the facts. The facts suck for Biden. Therefore, he is painting with broad strokes, claiming that the focus should still be on evil Trump and the republicans, and not the fact that Biden was quite possibly the worst choice in American history. He is afraid that too many eyes will be opened to the fact that the major networks actually subverted democracy by not only failing to properly vet Biden during the election process, but actually promoting him.
Lol..
Here's an actual study by an actual media organization that looked at the actual substance of the articles printed about Trump compared to other Presidents in their first 100 days:
Biden received more than double the favorable coverage Trump did and significantly less negative coverage:
The media went far far far too easy on Trump from 2015 until today, because no one in the media wants to offend 40% of the public by telling them they have supported a psychopathic narcissist mental case for president of the United States. Time and Newsweek want right wing readers too.
The mainstream media could have spared us the last 6 years by telling the truth about Trump from the beginning, but they would rather have higher revenues.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone with common sense actually believes this nonsense.
Nevertheless, for the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s true that Biden gets worse press coverage than Trump . . .
ROFLMAO
I’m sorry. I’m back now. Where was I?
Of yes! IF it’s true, then it’s deserved. For four years, we saw story after story about how 90% or 95% of Trump coverage was negative. And every time these stories came out, partisans on the Left insisted that was because Trump deserved the negative coverage - that he had earned it by virtue of his personality and his actions.
Now you want to act like negative coverage of Biden is some kind of unfair conspiracy? I don’t think so! What’s good for one is good for the other. If Biden’s coverage is negative, it’s his own fault.
These are the rules. They’re not my rules, but they are the rules, all the same.
It never ceases to amaze me how detached from reality those trapped in the Fox News bubble are...
True, but then there are many bubbles.
Some folks simply won't accept any criticism of Biden and Harris.
Everything MUST be compared to Trump for a select few.
Why can't Biden stand alone and take the criticism LIKE EVERY OTHER PRESIDENT BEFORE HIM HAS?
The media coverage has been very fair to Biden.
Pretending otherwise is nothing more than political gamesmanship on the behalf of a man who has largely been given a free pass for well over a year now from the press.
Very few of the comments on this article have addressed the writers actual point.
I may have to lock it.
You made a point and some of us are pointing out that your opinion is erroneous.
Dana Millbank was on tv last night explaining his point. Lets just say you dont get it.
So the column is argued as a desire for fair treatment for Biden in the press. To that end, we see talk of science, and data, and comparisons. But the ulitimate point, is not about fairness at all. Nor is it about a news media we can trust.
Can it? How do you know?
So, it does a word search and we’re supposed to have an understanding of the overall tenor and mood of the coverage based on that? This sounds like the same kind of wannabe “science” that causes Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to block perfectly innocent content. Not exactly the kind of thing I would want to use as the foundation for a persuasive argument.
I’m betting the author has no actual idea how hard it was for this guy to assemble the data, but this empty appeal to authority and emotion is meant to persuade us to respect the “validity” of his findings.
“The same four months?” How could they be the same? They’re different times. Journalism does not organically ebb and flow with the seasons like rain or snow. It responds to the stories. The last four months of 2021 are not the same as 2020. Context matters.
What was happening in summer and early fall of 2020? The pandemic was actually kind of flat and we were working on a vaccine that Trump could take a little credit for funding. The campaign was going, but not in a way that was very interesting or controversial. Talk of impeachment was done and Trump/Russia stories were finally being abandoned. There was also a lot of street crime and rioting to report on, but that didn’t have much to do with Trump.
What is going on in 2021? Covid continues to surge in spite of vaccine availability. Supply chains absolutely suck. People are seeing the impact of “defund the police” talk. Biden goes to a climate summit and has a nap. He doesn’t seem to be doing much personally to improve things. When he does endorse something, it’s never enough for the lunatic wing of the party, so he gets heat from both sides.
This is meaningless unless we know how the tone of presidential coverage compares to overall news coverage generally.
You’re JOKING! Who???? What journalists did that? Name one. No sane person believes that any journalist - who had previously been hard on Trump - suddenly changed their ways to give him a break. Come. On!
You mean like inventing a story that he conspired with Russia to get himself elected? Every president endures bullshit stories intended to delegitimize him, but that was unprecedented. It takes a lot of nerve to complain about far less robust and absurd efforts in that regard.
OK, so based on all that, you’d think we were reading an argument in favor of that neutral, skeptical media he mentioned earlier. But no. That is not what he wants at all.
See? Neutrality - something he just argued in favor of - now equals mindlessness. What he really wants is a news media working 24/7 for the Democratic Party, and more specifically to boost the public image of Joe Biden. Screw actual journalism!
"the degree to which the extremely nontransparent "AI" analysis cited by Milbank should shift our priors on it is somewhere between zero and less than zero."
Nate Silver