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There’s so much bad news lately that I thought about “bad news bias”.
You know what it is, don’t you? The tendency of the media to focus on the bad things. And, very often, how they could get worse.
These days, we seem to be stuck there. As in the old adage of the television news: “If it bleeds, it leads. Conflict, violence, disasters and death are always in the foreground.
We have COVID-19 and its delta variant, Afghanistan, fires and drought on one side of the country, floods and hurricanes on the other, fights for masks and political idiocy. It’s a bad daily buffet.
Oh, and as always, exacerbated by the cable news. MSNBC shouts from the left. Fox News shouts from the right. Too few outlets anywhere serve outspokenness without political trim.
On top of that, I just read a trial by Lance Morrow, author, former professor of presidential history at Boston University and current senior researcher at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, a Washington-based conservative think tank.
Morrow maintains that we live in “a golden age of stupidity”. From President Joe Biden’s handling of the evacuation in Afghanistan to the millions of Americans refusing to be vaccinated against a communicable disease.
Four years of President Donald Trump, writes Morrow, “offered dueling nonsense: buy one; get one for free. As Democrats played Wile E. Coyote at Trump’s Road Runner: Their “Acme Impeachment Committee” twice planted a big bomb, lit the fuse and held his ears, as “the Road Runner sped past. . Beep. Beep!“
Not the best of times, right? But the worst of times?
It depends, I guess, on the media you follow.
Earlier this year there was a lot of reporting (I wonder read so well) on research led by Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote on global coronavirus coverage.
His team examined hundreds of sources. All major US media, regional media, international media, and scientific journals. Certainly, the history of the pandemic has had very little good news. But research has found a lot more negativity in America’s mainstream media.
National reports were 87 percent negative. It was 64% negative in scientific journals, 53% negative in regional reports, 51% negative in international reports.
This negativity included an emphasis on increasing cases while minimizing declines in cases and tempering positive developments in vaccine news.
Part of the problem is that reports of the pandemic and its impact are both vital and frustrating. For the media. For media consumers. Things change as science evolves. There is politics. And voices still in question within the healthcare community.
For example, the White House recommendation on booster injections is to get one eight months after being fully vaccinated – but with the caveat that that could change.
Meanwhile, infectious disease experts like Penn’s Dr Aaron Richterman raise the seemingly sane point that we really don’t know if another injection of a vaccine developed for COVID-19 protects against a variant of COVID-19.
So, how are you.
There is nothing new about bad news bias, because of what psychologists call our own “negativity bias.” It creates an integrated thing of a supply and demand type. The media give the public what they want.
The BBC, in 2014, detailed research done on the subject at McGill University in Canada. He showed that when given a choice of articles to read (negative, positive, neutral), participants most often chose negative articles about corruption, setbacks, hypocrisy and the like.
It also showed that people most interested in politics and current affairs were more likely to choose bad news. And that these same people, interviewed, said they prefer the good news. Other studies show similar results.
Then there’s the good old human instinct. Our attraction to bad news is believed to be a genetic transmission from prehistoric ancestors.
Timothy Bono, a psychologist and researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, recently told the online mental health information service. Psycom.net, “We have inherited genes that predispose us to pay special attention to negative aspects of our environment that could be harmful to us. “
Basically bad news is coming. It could happen to us. We better be careful.
So while the news, sights, and sounds of all the wrong things may wear you out, don’t just blame the media. Chances are, you and your genes asked for it.
John Baer can be reached at [email protected].
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