US Mainstream Media Behind COVID Fear? Study Finds Staggering Difference Between News Coverage Here and Everywhere Else
The coronavirus pandemic was politicized in the media the U.S. before most Americans even started stocking up on toiletries and other goods.
The outbreak of the virus also came early in an election year in which President Donald Trump was set to run for re-election on a strong economy and record jobs.
But, as we know, coverage of the pandemic was alarmingly negative from the beginning, with most of the blame for the foreign illness being placed squarely on the shoulders of the president.
With the American establishment media being as partisan in favor of Democrats as it is, it’s no surprise Trump became a quick scapegoat for the public health emergency.
But a new study shows just how negatively the American media has handled the pandemic, relative to how it was covered internationally.
As we know, the coronavirus pandemic was global.
But according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a century-old Massachusetts-based think tank, only 50 percent of international news coverage of the pandemic was negative, whereas 91 percent of media coverage of the same pandemic was negative here in the U.S.
US major media coverage of COVID-19, vaccines, and school reopenings is significantly more negative than the scientific literature and non-US coverage, from Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cookhttps://t.co/lmxwxFUSbE pic.twitter.com/0bHTZC8Mny
— NBER (@nberpubs) November 24, 2020
In a study of media coverage dating back to January, the NBER concluded, “Ninety one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus fifty four percent for non-U.S. major sources and sixty five percent for scientific journals.”
The study further concluded that despite positive developments with regard to the pandemic, the American media still went negative — and it has stayed there.
“The negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials,” the study found.
It appears the bombardment of negative coverage might have actually conditioned many Americans to seek out negative news coverage, thus ignoring positive news about the pandemic.
“Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience. U.S. major media readers strongly prefer negative stories about COVID-19, and negative stories in general,” the NBER study found.
“Stories of increasing COVID-19 cases outnumber stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even during periods when new cases are declining,” the study added.
This is, of course no surprise, as many Americans were quick to adapt to wearing masks, hoarding hand sanitizer and even embraced opportunities in some areas to report their neighbors for not complying with health guidelines.
The sensational media coverage was so negative, and so partisan, that the virus itself quickly became a political subject, which we already knew, but the study showed.
Perhaps most surprisingly, a hopeful comment about a common anti-malaria drug made by President Trump in the early days of the crisis drove much of the negative coverage.
“Among U.S. major media outlets, stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine are more numerous than all stories combined that cover companies and individual researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines,” the study concluded.
The establishment media, of course, has the power to drive narratives, and we know that many prominent news agencies often appear to work together when crafting such reports.
The establishment media drove home the narrative beginning in March that the situation was perilous.
The prevailing media message early on was that the pandemic was unparalleled in its potential to kill, and that Trump was to blame for it.
Meanwhile, overseas, where populations were also dealing with the crisis, there was no 2020 election, and therefore, apparently, no need for the media to intentionally sensationalize negative news while simultaneously downplaying positive developments.
“Overall, we find that COVID-19 stories from U.S. major media outlets are much more negative than similar stories from other U.S. outlets and from non-U.S. sources,” the study concluded. “The negativity does not respond to changes in new cases. Potentially positive developments such as vaccine stories receive less attention from U.S. outlets than do negative stories about Trump and hydroxychloroquine. Overall, we are unable to explain the variation in negativity with political affiliation of an outlet’s audience, or U.S case count changes, but we do find that U.S. readers demand negative stories (as evidenced by article popularity).”
The NBER study came to its conclusions after analyzing more than 20,000 news reports from the 15 top U.S. publishers and 39 international news outlets.
What’s particularly noteworthy is that, even in the U.S. media, there was a difference in the emphasis of coverage, according to the report.
Stories about the coronavirus pandemic “published by the top 15 U.S media outlets (by readership/viewership) are 25 percentage points more likely to be negative in content than more general U.S. sources or major media outlets outside the U.S.,” the report stated.
As the first rounds of Americans prepare to take a vaccine within weeks following the historic success of Operation Warp Speed, it appears the country was all along dealing with two emergencies.
While dealing with a highly contagious virus, Americans were also coping with negative and partisan media reporting over it, which was overwhelmingly used against President Trump.
The NBER report avoided attributing the difference in coverage to the political sympathies of the outlets doing the reporting, but no one who has lived through the relentlessly negative mainstream media coverage of the Trump years needs to have that spelled out.
We can only assume that if the pandemic had occurred under the leadership of a Democrat, as the H1N1 pandemic did in 2009-2010 under the Obama administration, the coverage would be a considerably different story.
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