IT USUALLY IS: That Dana Milbank column is even dumber than you think.

Milbank claims journalists have been harder on President Joe Biden in the first year of his presidency than they were on former President Donald Trump in his last.

To support his position, he points to a report prepared by the analytical firm FiscalNote, whose “artificial intelligence” reviewed some 200,000 news articles to determine “sentiment” based on variables including adjective placement.

The group’s findings, which supposedly show the press have been tougher on Biden, confirm the Washington Post columnist’s worst fears: “My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”

His thesis is obvious bunk — as if a computer could ever hope to gauge “sentiment” accurately depending on adjective placement. However, after some additional digging, most notably by Don’t Walk, Run! Productions, which did the lion’s share of assessing FiscalNote’s data, it turns out Milbank’s theory is even flimsier than initially suspected.

Put simply, the research upon which his entire thesis rests, the supposed proof of the press’s collective failure to defend our big, wet Core Democracy™, is utter trash.

Read the whole thing.

I’d just add that for Milbank, Cillizza, et al., the important thing is to establish the lefty meme regardless of facts, so that they can be endlessly repeated on social media platforms that won’t fact-check them.