For reasons I don’t totally understand, American media is now trying to destroy American democracy. Obviously, some of the reasons are financial. Trump made them money. Biden is more solid and dependable, which translates to “boring”. Whatever the reason, the media is relentlessly and consciously trying to destroy the Biden-Harris administration and apparently get Trump and his chaos back in office. That would destroy what little is left of American democracy. I noticed the terrible, dishonest and super-critical coverage of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris only a couple of months after they were sworn into office in January, 2021. The “honeymoon” phase where the media lets a new administration get up to speed with positive coverage lasted only a couple of weeks. Then began the constant criticism, and it has grown to a near-daily litany of insults and dishonest reporting.
The media switches from Biden to Harris criticism. Just this week I noticed two super critical (and not at all honest) pieces of reporting critical of Kamala Harris, blaming her for staff quitting (and treating the subject as though that was something that never happened under Donald Trump, where it actually happened frequently.) Just today on the Washington Post website, this typical, trashy, sexist and racist treatment of the Vice President:
There is no need for this type of “story” and in fact it’s not a story at all. Why would anyone consider that “news”? It’s just an attempt to undermine her authority and public respect and try to portray her as a bad future presidential candidate. All because a few staff people moved on to other jobs. It’s utterly ridiculous. It’s also sexist and racist.
Joe Biden gets a veritable firehose of criticism from American media. In this recent article by Dana Milbanks, the author addresses this fact with actual statistics and proof. Read it! Here’s a small excerpt.
“Media Criticism of Biden Much Worse than of Trump
A sampling of headlines atop the influential Politico Playbook newsletter over the past month:
“Let the Democratic freakout begin.”
“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.
The findings, 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; embraced violent 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 of more than 30,000 he told in office.
And yet Trump got press coverage as favorable as, or better than, Biden is getting today.”
