An Ivy League education is not necessary to make the same observation that an economics professor at Dartmouth College made this past year, and published in a brand new report.
Here it is: mainstream media was obsessed with negative, doom-and-gloom reporting on the coronavirus pandemic.
Umm, most of knew that already, but the reaction of the outlets that jammed a year’s worth of negativity down our collective throats is what will be the interesting thing to study going forward…
It didn’t matter if COVID cases were going down, or what the data actually revealed, if the cable news shows, major newspapers and news magazines were reporting on anything pandemic related, they almost reveled in the bad news they would deliver and spin. Day after day. Night after night.
The professor is named Bruce Sacerdote, and he wanted to validate his hunches so he he began working with a couple researchers and put an elaborate file together to capture all their findings.
He would analyze the broadcasts on every major network, along with CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, MSNBC and others.
The next step for the researchers was to analyze their findings with a social science technique to examine the language of the reports and broadcasts.
Again, this is something that most people noticed, but now that Sacerdote has released his findings, the actual networks and news outlets that championed the depressing news every single day for almost a full year are acting astonished about it.
Here are some numbers attached from Sacerdote’s study. Roughly 87% of the COVID coverage in national media the past year has been negative.
His findings revealed that the negative coverage was consistent on both the liberal news outlets like CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times, as well as more conservative news sources like Fox News. (Who said these rival news organizations could find common ground on something!)
The National Bureau of Economic Research published the report as a working paper. It’s called “Why is all COVID-19 news bad news?”
As for why the journalists, anchors and reporters insisted on constantly harping on the most negative aspects of coronavirus news, and all but ignoring actual data from doctors that painted a more realistic picture, well, Sacerdote implied that the media is delivering viewers and readers what they want and demand.
That’s one way of putting it. Another way is this: many modern-day journalists are reflexively cynical, biased, alarmists, and inclined to think their natural narcissism is actually a healthy brand of skepticism.
Watch for big name news outlets to act shocked at these findings, and then self flog themselves to vow to do better at analyzing why this could have happened.
Unfortunately, consumers of the never-ending stream of negative coverage we were all subjected to for the past year can’t get that wasted time back. And there’s no doubt it added to a collective doom that many Americans felt, solely because of the negative and biased news coverage.
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