Our World in Data:
The media provides a near-instantaneous snapshot of single events; events that are, in most cases, negative. The persistent, large-scale trends of progress never make the headlines.
But is there evidence that such a disconnect exists between what we see in the news and what is reality for most us?
One study attempted to look at this from the perspective of what we die from: is what we actually die from reflected in the media coverage these topics receive?
This is a fascinating and a little scary look at data and how the media on all sides skews information.
This phenomenon is one reason I drastically limit my intake of the main news media and curate things. I scan Apple News to see the main stories of the day and what’s happening, but if you look at a lot of the news stories they’re usually a) negative b) not something I can do anything about (atrocities in Syria, war in the Congo, etc) and c) knowing or not knowing about them doesn’t affect my life.
The repetition itself has a bad effect on my emotional health, too. During the financial crisis there was a story almost daily on NPR about another foreclosure…. but that drip of sad stories didn’t inform me more and only served to make me sad and anxious with no real upside; the 50th story about a family losing their house didn’t enlighten me any more than the 5th story did.
Fact is, we don’t NEED 24x7xmany outlets news.
The basis of this is patently absurd, and ignores the role of the news media in the world. People always yammer about how the news is so negative. But the role of news is not to display a neutral statistically significant sample of all events that happen in the world, or even what on average kills us. (Individual stories? Sure, but blame the source as much as the reporters.)
The role of the news media is to point out trends that are unusual, which makes them immediately meaningful for whatever reason, or that teach us new things we didn’t know.
The process is of course flawed because it’s a human-driven enterprise. But to give one example of what I’m talking about, newspapers would have zero space if it reported all the normal mundane things that happen every day. We don’t talk about how many people didn’t die of smallpox, because nobody has. But if someone were to drop a vial of the virus at the cdc and dies from it, you bet it would be news. But not as a warning of some trend of smallpox coming back.
News organizations don’t report every day on how many airplanes don’t crash. It’s good news for sure how many don’t; but again it might be easy to miss the story about the occasional crash because we tend to avoid the boring aviation not crashing section of the paper.
The legitimate news media does not skew information intentionally. They do it out of ignorance, or they do it because unusual events are quick moving and they miss some details or context. The impression people get as to what’s trending in the world is often based on the fact that news gathering is a messy process. It’s as much their own ignorance of how news people shape the day’s news as it is in believing some nutty conspiracy that a cabal of liberal media elites are trying to shape a world’s perceptions for nefarious reasons.
Fox News? Yeah, they are doing it for nefarious reasons. Check out the recent Embedded podcast about Mitch McConnell. You want good solid news? Read/watch multiple sources and don’t rely on one.
We hear more terrible news because we have far more access to information about terrible things happening than previous generations had. Are there genuinely more pedophiles out there doing terrible things to helpless children? Or are we simply being told about more of them than our grandparents were?
Yes, there are outlets that deliberately shriek and attempt to frighten for both ideological and remunerative reasons, which is why I avoid extremist cable networks and local broadcast tv stations when what they call “reporting” is being peddled.
And, yes, atrocities in foreign countries or the number of foreclosures or business failures actually do directly affect my life. They are all connected to either policy that diverted my taxes to reckless, destructive activities, or to populations who’ll be even more motivated than ever to capriciously retaliate against perceived oppressors.
Discussions such as this are always bizarre as we talk about “news organizations” as if they exist _only_ for their own purposes. Of course that’s not true. They provide what they think their audience wants. Let that sink in–media companies serve their audience as best they can. Readership/viewership can and does change. So complaining about what is reported is moronic. If an audience really didn’t like an organization’s coverage, their audience would migrate elsewhere and the org would either be forced to change or go out of business.
We’re really complaining about our collective taste. Changing that is left as an exercise for future generations.
All of this is part of the distraction index.
It’s not surprising that we don’t
cover heart disease and cancer deaths with more frequency. Those are not sexy enough to garner a headline.
I remember in the 80’s when there were two successive case of child abduction/murder on the national news for a few weeks, then the local news station started showing their own reports about those cases and “how to keep your kids safe” stories. Suddenly my small Texas hometown went into a panic about child abduction and about half the kids who had been walking to school my whole life were suddenly being driven to school from a whole block away. I had friends who were no longer allowed to walk to my house. By the time I got out of college, almost no child walked to school anymore. There was never a single instance of child abduction in the town. Before all that, the only parent I knew who was anywhere near that paranoid lived with a police scanner day and night instead of a television – and since they heard all the false alarms being called back in, even they weren’t that bad. The 24 hour news cycle is the worst thing to ever happen to society in a hundred years.
If all these articles were “this is what we die from” then the criticism would be valid. But they’re not. They’re not saying ‘ohmigod we’re all dying of terrorism” they’re covering events of relative importance. (or what sells: if it bleeds it leads is not just a cynical cliche…)
Go a few sections into your average daily paper there are a lot of articles covering medical issues (usually poorly see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw ) but terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and airline crashes are not covered as medical events.
They’re comparing apple to fishhooks here.
This is precisely such a case. The enormous coverage of the two recent Boeing 737MAX crashes focused attention on the aircraft and manufacturer and helped bring to light the horrifyingly criminal negligence Boeing commited with the design and implementation of the aircraft systems, their sociopathic greed over-riding public safety. (The aircraft manuals dealing with the faulty anti-stall system were optional, extra cost manuals.)
And to prove my point further: from yesterday’s NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/boeing-737-max-crash.html
You know what proportion of people covered by the news are heads of state, members of government, corporate executives, celebrities etc? If you were to judge what people did by what was in the news, you would think the world was filled with senior management and national leaders instead of housekeepers, janitors truck drivers and fast food workers.
See how ridiculous that sounds?
While I think that sometimes news needs to better contextualize the trends in the grand scheme of things, the very nature of news is to highlight new meaningful occurrences. A better way to measure what is actually killing people is to go through the obituaries than the A1 page of a newspaper. A1 is going to be the dramatic, obits will be more representative.