Study: Media Reported Only Bad COVID News (Until Trump Lost)
I & I Editorial Board
March 29, 2021
I&I Editorial
A study published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research finds that coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic by the domestic press was overwhelmingly negative. More negative than the international press. More negative than the local press. And more negative than the science. But then a funny thing happened after President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid.
Researchers at Dartmouth College and Brown University did a content analysis of tens of thousands of COVID-19 news stories to look at the levels of negativity. What they found was that 87% of the stories published by the top 15 news sources in the country were negative in tone. That compares with 50% of international news sources, and 64% for scientific journals. They also found the mainstream media were 25 percentage points more likely to be negative than more general U.S news sources.
What’s more, this overwhelming negativity included even “areas with positive developments, including school re-openings and vaccine trials.†And, the researchers determined, the mainstream media coverage was “unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases.â€
In other words, the national press in the U.S. was putting a negative spin on everything COVID-related. (The study is titled “Why Is All COVID News Bad News?â€)
Those 14 top news sources tracked by the researchers, by the way, included only two that might be considered conservative – Fox News and the New York Post.
The researchers claim that the major U.S. media outlets were simply feeding the public’s desire for gloomy news.
more
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/29/report-media-reported-only-bad-covid-news-until-trump-lost/
