Update 3/24/2021 9:19 am CST: I see that, as I was preparing this post, Jack contributed a post based on the same story. Interesting to see another viewpoint!
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Every morning I receive an enewsletter from David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Today he reports on research which seems to show that the US national media consistently emphasized the negative aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, even when there was positive news to share.
Leonhardt summarizes research by Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote and colleagues:
The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity,” Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me. |
About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals. |
Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News). |
Leonhardt considers what this might mean for his profession:
If we’re constantly telling a negative story, we are not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality. We are shading it. We are doing a good job telling you why Covid cases are rising in some places and how the vaccines are imperfect — but not such a good job explaining why cases are falling elsewhere or how the vaccines save lives. Perhaps most important, we are not being clear about which Covid developments are truly alarming.
Why do national COVID-19 stories consistently skew in this direction? Leonhardt:
When the researchers examined which stories were the most read or the most shared on Facebook, they tended to be the most negative stories. To put it another way, the stories that people choose to read skew even more negative than the stories that media organizations choose to publish. “Human beings, particularly consumers of major media, like negativity in their stories,” Sacerdote said. “We think the major media are responding to consumer demand.”
Leonhardt, from his journalist's perspective, adds another possible factor:
In the modern era of journalism — dating roughly to the Vietnam War and Watergate — we tend to equate impact with asking tough questions and exposing problems. There are some good reasons for that. We are inundated by politicians, business executives, movie stars and others trying to portray themselves in the best light. Our job is to cut through the self-promotion and find the truth. If we don’t tell you the bad news, you may never hear it. |
Sometimes, though, our healthy skepticism can turn into reflexive cynicism, and we end up telling something less than the complete story. |
What follows are my views: to Leonhardt's analysis, I would add that it's also incumbent on us as consumers of news to maintain a certain level of skepticism - without, as Leonhardt notes, letting that skepticism "turn into reflexive cynicism".
We should recognize that no reporter or editor (nor anyone else) can be completely free from unconscious bias; that at an organizational level, many news organs have intentional and conscious political leanings; that those who report and edit for national news organizations tend to be drawn from a fairly narrow segment of society (even in the midst of good-faith attempts to diversify).
We should also recognize that we've recently emerged from four years of politics and governance which struck many in the news industry (and many of the rest of us) as an extraordinary time, in which it was not only permissible but urgently mandatory to set aside former standards of objectivity in order to serve the higher good of protecting what is good and admirable about American society.
All of these factors, added to Leonhardt's observation that the world is saturated with spin, gaslighting and self-promotion, make the discernment of what is actually true to be more complex and difficult than ever.
I happen to be in a holy order whose core mission is to proclaim Good News, not as spin or gaslighting, but as what is true. It seems important to note that, while this proclamation isn't as dangerous as it has been in other places and times, it seems in some ways more difficult than ever to be heard; and one of those reasons may be that large social forces, apparently including the national news media, have us so well-trained to expect bad news. It strikes me that we may be ill-disposed to receive Good News.
Well, Jim and Jack read the same articles this morning it seems.
ReplyDeleteAs did I.
I think there is truth that the coverage was often pretty negative. I don't watch TV news, so can't judge either Fox News or MSNBC, but the lying mainstream media like NYT and WaPo did seem to highlight the more negative news. I was actually surprised to see Fox News as among those highlighting the negative. It had seems to me that their talking heads were pushing "it's a hoax" or "it's no worse than the flu" theories But apparently there is a divide between the news staff and the talking heads.
I often looked to the original sources (the journal articles) and occasionally to overseas sources like BBC.
But I also think that the scientific/medical world has learned a lot in the last year. They have narrowed the relative dangers of factors like age, pre-existing conditions etc. They have been able to observe the successes and failures of re-openings at different levels of virus existing in given communities, and of the risks involved with reopening schools. The socio-economic factors that play into the risk for any population are more clear now than a year ago. They know how to handle the disease better in hospitals, understand a bit better what works and what doesn't work.
But as we know from Tom's death, the danger for some of us is still high. My sister-in-law and brother survived it after severe illness. Her brother did not. He also died in January, about 10 days after Tom.
So where is the balance point? When is there too much fear-mongering and when is there too little?
"So where is the balance point? When is there too much fear-mongering and when is there too little?"
DeleteMy personal view is that the news media have an ethical obligation to inform us; and that "inform" should be understood as conforming to the hoary notion of, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The critique of Sacerdote et al, as summarized by Leonhardt, seems to be that the media told the truth, and perhaps tried hard to tell nothing but the truth, but may have come up short in telling the whole truth.
To repeat something I mentioned recently in another context: those who are elite in our society, which certainly includes government officials and national news media, need to trust the American people. We need to operate under the assumption that Americans can handle the truth responsibly. Americans are not infants or dependents from whom some true things must be filtered out because it's too terrible or too risky for us to know about them.
I don't think Leonhardt used the term, but I suppose "fear-mongering" is an apt description of what the media perpetrated. The call here would seem to be to balance fear-mongering with, er, hope-mongering (when warranted by the facts!) to give us an accurate picture of reality.
When over 500,000 Americans have died, it is difficult to make the case that the media overdid the negative! True they may have been more negative that media in other countries, but then we are a large country, and a very wealthy country and everyone had the right to expect that we should have come out of this better than we have.
DeleteLast year at this time most Americans expected the pandemic would be over, that it would fade in the summer and perhaps have a resurgence in the winter like the season flu. They did not expect the vaccines would be here as soon as they were, or be as effective as some of them seem to be. So we have to take that into account in accusing the media of fear-mongering.
ReplyDeleteAlso as Anne points out we did not know as much as we know now so it was appropriate to speculate in terms of worse case scenarios.
Trumps disinformation and rosy self promoting optimism did not make the media's attempt to be unbiased any easier.