‘Absurd,’ ‘Cockamamie,’ ‘Complete Crap’: Analysts Destroy Claim That Biden Gets Worse Media Treatment Than Trump

Ben JohnsonDecember 8, 2021

Allegations that the media gave President Joe Biden more negative coverage than President Donald Trump are based on a faulty computer algorithm that render the results “complete crap,” according to a left-of-center pollster.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight analyzed a widely shared Washington Post story, which claims to present scientific evidence that the legacy media were harder on Biden from mid-July through late October than they were on President Trump over the same period in 2020.

Liberal columnist Dana Milbank based his conclusions on an artificial intelligence program, which performed a “sentiment analysis” of “more than 200,000 articles” from 65 websites. He then accused journalists who criticized President Joe Biden of being “accessories to the murder of democracy.”

But Silver writes that the underlying algorithm was tainted.

“[T]he @milbank WaPo article this weekend is complete crap,” Silver tweeted on Monday.

For instance, the algorithm rated a highly critical story from FiveThirtyEight “on Trump/GOP efforts to undermine democracy” as neutral toward the ex-president.

The stories that the AI algorithm rated as most pro-Biden seemed “totally random,” he wrote. “Many have nothing to do with Biden at all (‘Haiti President Assassinated At Home, Wife Wounded’).” It appears positive or negative words about general events, like the Haitian president’s assassination, were “taken completely out of context.”

He also wrote that more negative media coverage resulted from the president’s slouching approval rating, which fell dramatically with the compounding problems of the president’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, historic level of illegal immigration, and decades-high inflation.

“I don’t think it reflects some sort of bias if Biden’s approval rating drops 5 points and the news outlet writes about that, and the framing is mostly negative,” Silver wrote.

To this good thread explaining why the “sentiment analysis” cited in the @milbank WaPo article this weekend is complete crap—the analysis was used to make the claim that the press is just negative toward Biden as Trump—I’ll also add a couple of comments based on their data. 1/ https://t.co/V8pPJoM13p

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 6, 2021

Designing good algorithms is hard, but this is an especially bad one.

And as a news consumer, you should be extremely wary of statistical methodologies you don’t understand but that confirm your priors. 8/8

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 6, 2021

Milbank’s story made waves at CNN, which devoted two days of coverage to it. Brianna Keilar interviewed Milbank on Monday’s “New Day,” where he admitted that “Biden’s coverage was more favorable than Trump’s before” August. Yet his report should be considered “a tremendous indictment of our whole industry,” Milbank said. “I think we really need to do some soul searching and think about what it is we’re delivering to people.”

After Keilar pointed out that the algorithm found that Milbank’s employer, The Washington Post, treated Trump worse than Biden, Milbank replied that “the Post and CNN have done better than the average.” Keilar mildly rebuffed the report, saying, “It’s not the job of the reputable news outlets to compensate for, like, the crap that a Breitbart puts out.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter also highlighted Milbank’s column on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources.”

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume called Milbank’s story “absurd,” saying it had been concocted by a “cockamamie” artificial intelligence program,” on Tuesday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“They’re nowhere near as tough as they were on Donald Trump, who was hated with a passion from the beginning of the election campaign in 2016 right through the end of his presidency and and through to today,” Hume said.

In reality, Trump received a historic level of media hostility for all four years of his administration. The “Big Three” networks’ coverage of Trump skewed more than 90% negative during the first impeachment “push”, according to an analysis conducted by the Media Research Center. For instance, during the time in question — last June and July — 95% of legacy media statements about Trump were negative, while two-thirds of their statements about Biden were positive.

“Designing good algorithms is hard, but this is an especially bad one,” Silver concluded.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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