Charles Cooke of National Review Online rebuts the argument that our current president faces tougher media coverage than his predecessor.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank believes that he has hit upon a journalistic scandal. “After a honeymoon of slightly positive coverage in the first three months of the year,” Milbank wrote last week, President “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.” …
… If, upon reading this, you thought to yourself, “there is no human being alive who could possibly have concluded that this is happening” . . . well, then you were correct, because it turns out that no human being alive did conclude that this is happening. Instead, Milbank’s evidence — which he describes hilariously as “painstakingly assembled” “proof” — came from a bunch of servers. “At my request,” he explained, “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.” …
… Responding to Milbank’s conclusions, the statistician Nate Silver noted drily that “the degree to which the extremely nontransparent ‘AI’ analysis cited by Milbank should shift our priors” on this question “is somewhere between zero and less than zero.” Silver is correct. Milbank’s credulous talk may impress the partisan laymen, but the harsh truth is that what he is selling here is closer to snake oil than to “artificial intelligence” (itself a marketing term). In his piece, Milbank claims that “artificial intelligence can now measure the negativity with precision.” But this isn’t true — it can’t be. …
… There is a reason that Milbank’s piece provoked such hysterical laughter upon publication, and that reason was that its readers were people.
