Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Only Bad News


I do not want any of you to think that this is going to be a habit, but … this is another piece inspired by an article in the NYT. However, to be more precise the article in the NYT is again written by David Leonhardt. (Note to David … “Be careful as the Goliath that you work for may already have you on their potential cancel culture list.”) For regular readers see my piece of 3/21/21, The Covid Dichotomy, also inspired by Leonhardt. Is it possible that he reads my  blogs regularly? I say this because on 3/25/21 he wrote about something that I have been alluding to for many many months.

Leonhardt starts off with something that Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth noticed while watching TV. His initial observations were from watching CNN and PBS, which are both liberal networks. (Keep in mind that he is a college professor.) Nonetheless, Sacerdote noticed that Covid coverage almost always seemed negative, regardless of what he was seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew.

Let me point out that I have been noticing that same tendency in my local newspaper for many months. I wrote letters-to-the-editor, off course never published, and emailed a local news columnist and asked him if he had been told to only report “Covid bad news.” Now that the Covid story seems to have turned the corner, I thought that perhaps he would switch to Covid good news, but his column for today is titled “Two Cases of Variant Confirmed in County.” This makes me even more suspicious that he is following orders from his superiors . . . “Only Covid bad news!”

Back to Leonhardt’s NYT article: 

“The results showed that Sacerdote’s instinct had been right — and not just because the pandemic has been mostly a grim story.

“About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year (including CNN. Fox, Politico, NYT, and hundreds of other sources) was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

Why is this? 

Sacerdote postulated that the major media is responding to consumer demand. I do not agree with his conclusion as it makes no sense to think that the consumer public is dramatically different in the U.S (87% negative) versus international media (only 51% negative). Consumers are consumers irrespective of where they live. On the other hand could the vastly negative Covid media coverage be political? Hmmm!

3/28/21

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