Is the media making you feel worse about Covid? This study says yes

When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, news coverage was soon dominated by reports of lockdown measures, increased infection rates and deaths.

The coverage of these alarming developments continued into the summer months, as the country worked to address the pandemic while prioritising the development of vaccines and other treatments.

Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, found himself isolated at home during those months, like a majority of Americans, and consuming news about Covid-19. That was when he first began to suspect that American news organisations appeared to veer towards negative coverage about most topics related to Covid-19 even if the news was positive.

For example, infections rates in the US first stabilised and started to decrease April into May, but Mr Sacerdote found news organisations would instead focus on case increases in specific areas or the growing death toll.

This negative coverage also appeared when the University of Oxford collaborated with AstraZeneca to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Although the research and development of Covid-19 vaccine trials was positive news within the science community, positive coverage from American news publications lagged for several weeks.

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This encouraged Mr Sacerdote and two other researchers to study if major American news organisations were more negative in covering Covid-19 compared to international publications.

"We wanted to make a comparison between us and everybody else. US major media sources versus everybody else," Mr Sacerdote told The Independent.

The study incorporated scientific journals as well so researchers would have a benchmark, or control group, to determine if tone of coverage veered away the “absolute truth”.

"At times we were thinking, 'OK maybe there's an absolute standard of truth.' For example, the number of cases: it's going up, or it's going down. What are [publications] reporting?" Mr Sacerdote said. "So we were looking for those benchmarks."

To analyse how coverage compared, the researchers pulled Covid-19 articles from 1 January, 2020 to 31 December, 2020 from US major news networks like CNN and Fox News, as well as hundreds of publications like Politico and The New York Times.

Coverage was then pulled from overseas publications and scientific journals to compare the general tone. To narrow the focus of the study, the researchers pulled articles related to infection numbers, vaccine development, and schools reopening. Articles were then studied by characterizing the language used as negative, neutral, or positive.

Mr Sacerdote and his team found that nearly 87 per cent of coverage from US national media companies was negative, compared to about 51 per cent of negative coverage from other international publications and 53 per cent from regional US publications. Additionally, the researchers found that this negative coverage was displayed across the board for US publications – no matter if they leaned left or right.

These findings were published in a paper entitledWhy Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"We were surprised at just how incredibly strong the results were and how they hold up with relatively crude measures of negativity ... we get the same answer over and over again," Mr Sacerdote said.

When looking at national infection rates between April and July, which declined during specific periods, researchers found that US publications focused on areas that were still increasing or on the cumulative death toll – which led to an overall negative tone in coverage.

For vaccine development and schools reopening, researchers also found a consistent negative tone despite data indicating otherwise.

“We highlighted two areas, vaccines and schools reopening, where we think there’s some real scientific evidence,” Mr Sacerdote said, “and we think that the US major media lagged behind the science on these things, or has not trumpeted the good news on all these topics.”

The Independent has reached out to The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News for a comment.

"Unfortunately negativity sells," Mr Sacerdote said. "It's our hypothesis that these US outlets are incredibly good at producing things that get clicks and views and shares, and they seem to be more aggressive."

This hypothesis was reaffirmed because the researchers also looked into the most shared and viewed articles from the publications, and the results showed that readers were interacting with negative articles about Covid-19 more than they were interacting with positive articles.

Countries like the United Kingdom, in comparison, came nowhere close to producing the same amount of negativity when covering Covid-19.

"[The results] let us hypothesise that the structure of the US major media is better at profit-maximizing or more aggressive at view or click maximizing than perhaps media in other places," Mr Sacerdote said.

Many factors could play into why exactly the researchers found that US coverage was more negative. Donald Trump, for example, was president at the time of the study, and his coverage from the media often veered more negative, especially during Covid-19 because he was criticised for his lack of response to the pandemic.

But the researchers found that this negative coverage towards the virus continued after Mr Trump left office, indicating that he was not necessarily the cause of the country being a media outlier.

"We weren't looking to write a paper that was just about one particular politician," Mr Sacerdote said, “but this gap in negativity between the US major media and all other sources ... whether you look at 2019 or 2020, whether you look at Covid or not ... the US major media is an outlier."

"It remains true after Trump left office," he added.

The answer largely hinges on how media companies and journalists can respond and reflect on their past coverage of events, like Covid-19.

"I think that journalists really do want to provide a public service, a public good," Mr Sacerdote said.

But it was his hope that media companies and journalists would take the information from the study, "pull back", and prioritise providing "balanced" coverage for readers that would give them an accurate picture of the facts.

Responsibility also relied on readers being active participants in the news coverage they were consuming each day and how they processed that information.

"We really need to be critical thinkers," Mr Sacerdote said. This included recognising potential biases in reporting and consuming a variety of media sources, he added.