I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, December 9th.

Who do you think gets worse press, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Well, according to a media content

analysis done at the request of Washington

Post columnist Dana Milbank, who will join us in a sec, Biden actually gets as much negative press

as Trump and sometimes worse. How can that be, considering the magnitude of the threats and

failures each man objectively deserves to be criticized for

as compared with the other or at least questioned about. Let's find out with Washington Post columnist

Dana Milbank. His column is called The Media Treats Biden as badly or worse than Trump. Here's

proof. And Dana thinks this isn't just a problem for Joe Biden, but a problem for democracy.

Dana, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hello. Can you hear me?

There we go. Now we got you. Would you start at the beginning and tell us what you were noticing

that led you to ask someone to do a data analysis of this?

Sure.

I mean, I was noticing, you know, the headlines in my paper and then others and, you know,

listening to cable news, you know, not your show of, you're not to blame in any of this,

but it seemed like it was particularly negative. So I went to this group

called Fiscal Note, and they have a unit called forge.aI. And they did this for me. I commissioned

it in a sense, but they did it on their own dime. And so they used a database of some 200,000 articles from 65 publications.

We're talking tens of millions of word about Joe Biden in 2021.

And they compared it to Donald Trump in 2020 and 2019.

The database didn't go back further, so we couldn't do a more extensive comparison.

...