I know you don't believe me when I keep telling you that things are better than you think. But maybe you'll believe a team of Ivy League economists who have studied media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Via David Leonhardt, here's the nut of what they found:
The US national media is relentlessly negative about COVID-19. It's also pretty negative about everything else, and this has nothing to do with partisan leanings. It's as true for the New York Times as it is for Fox News. But why?
An obvious question is, why are the U.S. major media so much more negative than international media and other outlets?...We suggest three possible explanations which deserve further exploration.
First, most of the non-U.S. markets in our sample include a dominant publicly owned news source. The U.K. has the BBC, while Canada has CBC and Australia has the ABC. Each of these news outlets is the number one news source in its respective country and may be following a different objective function than private news providers. This could potentially alter the behavior of all news providers.
Second, U.S. media markets are notably less concentrated than media markets in other OECD countries (Noam 2016). This higher level of competition may cause U.S. major media companies to use negativity as a tool to attract viewers.
Finally, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission eliminated its fairness doctrine regulation in 1987....It may be that profit maximizing U.S. news providers realized that they should provide not only partisan news to serve their consumers' tastes but also negative news which is in high demand.
In other words, perhaps the answer is that Americans love bad news and demand ever more of it. But if that's true, why is it only national media that's so negative? It's one thing for American media to be more negative than international media, but American national media is wildly more negative than local media. What accounts for that?
Hypotheses non fingo, I'm afraid. But this paper suggests that media negativity extends beyond just COVID-19 coverage. Keep this in mind the next time you scan the day's news and come away thinking the United States is close to collapse. It's really not so.
Personally, I only tune into National TV news when stuff is happening. Stuff generally being negative . I’m sure many people are the same. Hence more negative news get higher ratings. As for the NYT and Wash Post I read both but pick and choose so no idea. Local vs Nat is easier. You look at and read local news to see what’s going on locally. Where you either know it is hell or isn’t. No need for them to be negative more then necessary. My not too thought out response to Dave’s column today.
IF it bleeds, it leads!
Click bait!!!
Another possible interesting study area: local news. How has the reporting on local disasters, e.g. house fires, accidents, crime, shifted from the actual local area to incidents happening nationally? Does the number of stories on a type of event correlate with the number of events happening locally?
Stole my comment. It's not at all clear to me that "American national media is wildly more negative than local media" generally, even if it is true for COVID.
I would suggest instead that it's all a symptom of our media -- national and local -- being commercial, and that even though house fires and massive car crashes sell generally, "good" or "useful" COVID information sells at a local level, while at a general level the doom-and-gloom still gets the most eyeballs. That is, people want to hear that things are going okay locally with the pandemic, while they're still rubbernecking the national train wreck.
I admit I'm repeating myself, but remember, in pretty much all American media "news" is not really news; it's news-formatted entertainment.
This is not surprising to me. I think Andy Rooney pointed out that 'Priest helps parishioners" is not news, but "Priest abuses parishioners" is.
Also, my local news seems to pull a lot of its ;feel good' stories from Reddit...it really is the front page of the internet. I have never been a regular viewer of cable news and its always jarring when I do get a glimpse of it. NPR is always on and they can also harp on the negative, but its infinitely better and deeper than TV.
It's juvenile cynicism, even when there's a point to it, meant to offset the parade of cute news, 'everyday heroes' and 'making a difference' stories. If it weren't for the negativity they'd be accused of running nothing but that. They don't want to seem like they're being suckered or that they are not hip to the ghastliness.
There are many more national media outlets than there used to be with cable and other sources, and the cable news networks are on 24/7. There is more competition for attention for national news and more time to fill up. On the other hand local news has been shrinking - only the biggest cities have more than one newspaper.
Yes, partisan leanings have a lot to do with it. Obviously Fox News is relentlessly negative about Democrats, and now MSNBC is (mostly) negative about Republicans. The out party is always going to predict doom from what the in party is doing, and as Republicans become more detached from reality this gets wilder.
The fact that the media are like chicken little does not prove that things are doing fine. A lot of things are getting worse despite what Kevin says. His specific claims about this often make little sense.
things have always been "bad." always. we tend to forget that, and we tend to see our problems, our issues as the most intractable because they're ours.
I believe there is an overlooked facet here, namely expertise. I'm not saying that incompetence reigns (no matter how much I suspect it), I'm saying the very points that would illuminate optimistic outlooks are lost in translation when an expert is not a good communicator and the reporting side doesn't perform its duties faithfully. Or maliciously.
Our media is awash in faux expertise outside of journalism and I feel it's seeping into it for the other points you've presented. Isaac said it best.
A bit of irony. The US is supposed to have too much media consolidation yet the more upbeat news nations have an even more dominant source.
They're two different problems. Media consolidation is putting too much power over information in too few hands (mostly right-wing), especially in radio, when "media" means not so much news as advocacy. They just find different things to point to as sky-is-falling evidence. They're in fact competing on bad news.
The problem as far as bad news dominance is a product of our beloved markets. Competition breeds excess.
I would say this includes not only what people think of as media giants (NYTimes, Broadcast networks, cable networks such as Fox & MSNBC), but also "alternative media" such as Vox, Vice, Slate, etc. In order to generate page views and revenue, every news article has to be "sky is falling" panic. No one clicks on balanced, factual news stories. They are boring.
This country is never going to heal until reporters take a good look in the mirror and realize they are part of the problem. They labor under the misapprehension that they are part of the solution. They definitely are not. And yes, I include both left wing and right wing media. Both rely on heavy distortions of reality to generate readers/viewers.
There was a time where I would go to Vox and see nothing - at all - other than articles with apocalyptic headlines. I finally just gave up on that site as a result. Slate is not far behind, but I'm still wavering on that one due to a few good remaining writers there ...
I'm not sure what local news they analyzed, but the local news on my TV has been an unwatchable firehose of negativity for years... "A guy near you got mugged and killed, this house caught on fire, do pigeons have rabies?! Here's Tom with the weather."
At least they cut to the weather.
Where does NPR fit in? PBS?
“It's always darkest before it becomes totally black.”
― Mao Zedong
Unconvinced. I follow German media regularly and listen to American MSM. Also following the daily update from Kevin. There was just more bad news here. The description of the “research” was also less that enlightening.
My recollection of watching the evening news while a resident in Bavaria was a well dressed woman or man, sitting behind a desk devoid of decoration, reading from a short stack of papers, each describing an event from that day.
No cute jokes, no drama beyond the content itself.
It spoiled me. We don't watch TV here.
Back when we had to walk to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways... What goes for MSM there is mostly the same as here. There were always "news magazines", 45 min to an hour, sometimes heavily criticized for tone and possibly bad reporting. As far as I can tell the sky has been falling there, even in the summer when they were able to do things we couldn't do in SoCal. More recently, in light of low vaccination and their 3rd wave happening now, it's much worse. I think the tone reflects the situation: the US had much higher infection rates in the summer than anywhere in Europe. There was never a time to relax.
Pinker in "Enlightenment Now" (p. 51) has a graph on "tone of the news" from 1945 to 2010.
Tone in NYT coverage was strongly positive until 1965, then had a precipitous drop and it's been negative ever since (with bottoms around 1972, 1991, 2003). Tone in world broadcast news has been dropping since 1980.
Not sure what's driving the shift, but we do seem to live in particularly pessimistic times despite conditions that are objectively better than in the past in many ways. My parents' generation survived two world wars, the Great Depression, higher levels of poverty, the 1918 epidemic, polio, and other maladies, and were probably more optimistic about the world than people today.
You can't fix things that are broken or about to collapse if you don't report on it.
Just saying.
Plenty of negative reporting, but it's not enough to get folks to wear a damn mask or observe social distancing.
And the relation between doomsaying and prevention is even worse with climate change.
I think too many people treat news as theater, and not actionable intelligence.
Well, local news is incredibly positive. Life is GREAT!!!
The dichotomy is weird. Very few, if any, people I know feel that the economy is great and things are better. People see the US is not well. And my foreign students from Asian countries are shocked at how poor our infrastructure is. And it is.