The end… might not be near. Doom… might not be inevitable. But not according to the news. “Al Jazeera: [00:00:00-00:00:05]: After
a weekend of dramatic White House emergency actions, U.S President…” “[00:00:00-00:00:12] BBC: Joe Biden
has given the go ahead for a controversial oil drilling scheme. Environmentalists say it's a carbon bomb. Indigenous groups warning it will damage local
wildlife” “[00:00:24-00:00:31] PBS NewsHour: And, despite a wet winter in the west, persistent
drought and overdevelopment cause record low water levels for tens of millions of Americans.” Imagine… a forest. Imagine it’s your home. It’s both your shelter and your source of
sustenance. It offers rocks to make axes, timber to build
shelters, but most importantly, berries and nuts and ducks and all sorts of food, but
to get to it, you have to go out. “Out” is scary. “Out” is where the threats are. You’re on a path. Your sight-lines are limited. This forces you to walk… to search. As a necessity for survival—to find the
food that will feed you, your mate, or your child; that will ensure a slightly altered
copy of your DNA gets copied once again; to keep the species alive—you need to tread
into the unknown. So you walk, and you search, and you walk,
and you search, and you walk, and you search, and you walk, and you… bear. There’s a bear! Epinephrine, cortisol—your heart rate spikes,
breathing quickens, blood vessels contract, digestion stops. Your vision focuses, your pupils dilate, your
hearing drops out, your muscles tense, and within an instant, your body has reworked
itself, reprioritized resources, switching from a physiological state suited to exploring,
to one that can best assess, address, or evade a threat. This split-second moment of identifying a
threat has occurred immeasurable times through human history, ending in immeasurable different
outcomes, but each of these outcomes can be categorized into one of two categories: survival
or death. Extraneous factors altered each—a slippery
rock slowed a retreat, a convenient cave offered refuge, a blunt spear inhibited a defense—but
when summing the total of those immeasurable instances, there was a pattern. The degree of that physiological response
correlated to the likelihood of survival. How well muscles tensed, how much vision focused,
how quickly cortisol released—all this mattered to whether or not a human survived an encounter
with a threat, so, through the totality of humanity, the DNA that created humans with
stronger response to the negative was more likely to get recreated through offspring. That’s evolution. But that’s also a theory. What we do know, with certainty, is that today’s
humans respond more strongly to a negative stimulus than a positive one, even when those
two stimuli are objectively equal in weight. Think back to high school—what do you remember:
the great jokes you told, or all the awkward encounters. This disproportionate response is something
that we can and have proved time and time again in academic research, so we call it
the negativity bias. But what we can’t directly prove is whether
this is something natural—something rooted in our DNA, crafted by evolution—or if it’s
cultural: maybe society overemphasizes negative moments. Maybe the awkward encounters from middle school
really did have more of an impact on others’ perception of us than the great jokes, and
so we’ve learned to react to them appropriately.
But evolution leaves its fingerprints,
and natural experiments can search for them. Certain humans are male, certain others are
female, and the most critical component of evolution is reproduction. During human pregnancy, the evolutionary influence
of parental death differs depending on whether it occurs to a father or mother. If a father dies, the likelihood of reproductive
success does go down—there’s then only one individual, in a diminished physical state,
to find food and fight off threats. But there’s still a chance. If the mother dies, however, that’s it. Reproduction fails. Evolution stops. But simultaneously, in an era when pregnancy
was far more perilous than today, reproductive success went up when food was more plentiful. Therefore, the chance of a father’s DNA
getting passed on increased as they found more food, but to do so, they couldn’t be
too worried about the negative—the threats. They needed to be motivated to take the level
of risk that optimizes for finding the most food possible, even if it increases their
chances of death. Meanwhile, the mother, with far higher and
more direct evolutionary pressure to survive, must first and foremost focus on her and her
child’s survival. Her fight or flight response needs to be huge
so she’s able to best respond to any threat that she might encounter. When studied, the facts support this theory:
male humans exhibit a weaker negativity bias than female ones. They still have the bias, they still respond
disproportionately to the negative, but not quite as strongly. It seems like evolution worked, crafting a
structure that appropriately optimized for the greatest likelihood of successful reproduction.
So the case is made: as best we can tell,
the negativity bias was not learned, it was evolved. It’s natural. The positive just doesn’t elicit the same
emotional response in humans, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it because
it is literally rooted in our the DNA that developed before farming and restaurants and
electricity and supermarkets and telephones and TV and the internet and the information
overload that inundated us far faster than evolution could possibly respond. We are dumb monkeys using our dumb monkey
brains to trick other dumb monkeys into giving other dumb monkeys attention, and there’s
nothing we can do about it. So, we react more quickly and with more force
to the negative. It follows then that our eyes are naturally
drawn first toward the day’s bad news. But the trend toward the negative starts even
before you, the consumer—it begins with the journalist. Subject to the same natural negativity bias,
it’s more likely that what a journalist ends up pitching to their editor takes on
a negative slant—subconsciously, it just feels more important to cover, more exciting
to follow, and carries more potential to captivate an audience. This negative lean, of course, goes up the
line, influencing the editor that then green-lights the story, the news institution that publishes
the story, and the award juries that recognize exceptional work. Next, the negativity bias gets rewarded by
the public. It supplies a demand, receiving clicks, views,
engagement, outrage, and attention from people who can’t help but react to the bad news. It’s all pretty intuitive: bad news proliferates
because it’s biologically what reporters are drawn to report on and consumers are drawn
to consume. But none of this explains why some country’s
media is more negative than others. That has less to do with human nature, and
more with how a society goes about making news. Among journalists, there’s surprisingly
little consensus as to what exactly is defined as news. Sure, there’s a dictionary definition, but
it’s so broad that it might be easier to identify what news isn’t than is. A functional definition, on the other hand,
has proved hard to come by and harder to agree on. To some journalists, news is news when it
fits into one or more of these particular, identifiable bins. For others, the list slightly differs. For others still, the notion of even trying
to qualify what actually counts as news is too much to ask—you know it when you see
it; it, simply, is. Zoom out further, and questions become more
vexing. What is news for: is it entertainment, or
a public service? Whose role is it to produce and provide the
news: the state, or independent organizations? Who does the news serve: stakeholders, shareholders,
the state, the public? But while these questions might keep academics
up at night, media institutions answer them every moment of every day with every piece
they publish—offering through example after example of exactly what that particular society
has decided to define as news and the purpose of news. For decades, critical onlookers have scanned
America’s pro-private, hyper-competitive, for-profit media landscape and have drawn
two broad conclusions—it tends to be more negative than most, and it’s getting more
negative. What’s been more difficult though, was proving
to what extent, if any, US media skewed more negatively than other nations. With different events impacting different
countries, afterall, and with different cultural assumptions as to what different events mean,
it’s nearly impossible drawing a clean comparison between any two nation’s media—maybe,
in a bigger country, there’s just too much bad happening to leave airtime for the good. Well, that was until one story came to impact
every single media market on the planet at the exact same time. Really like no other phenomena before it,
the COVID-19 pandemic and its near universal weight offered the rarest of opportunities
to compare media tone across countries. Some identified the chance, and in early 2021,
this paper analyzing and comparing English-language stories’ approach to reporting on the pandemic
went public. Collecting some 20,000 COVID articles from
these sources in the US, and these sources abroad, the researchers traced the prevalence
of negative words and terms to predict the negative slant of each. The results were staggering. This is the negativity trend in international
sources across much of 2020, hovering steadily around 50%. Then this is the US media, whose COVID-19
coverage leaned negative at a whopping 87% across the study. And this vast gulf between just how bad the
news is in the US versus the rest of the world is only exacerbated by these additional findings:
that the nation’s most popular news sources trend even more negative than average performers. Clearly, the negativity bias is working, fueling
a vicious cycle that will only lead to more and more and more of it, and this all feels
like a problem.
But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just… a thing. After all, this is natural. Maybe negativity is just how we communicate. Maybe it’s even a good thing: we talk about
our issues, meaning we find ways to address them. Or maybe it can be both: a simultaneous source
and stymie of progress. Consider it theoretically. Say negative news gets just 10% more attention. First, one must consider that it’s an arms
race: there are only so many eyeballs, so when the success metric is eyeballs in a competitive
news industry, any edge, be it little, will get captured. So a 10% attention edge will lead to 20%,
or 30%, or 40% more negative news, because if everyone else is doing it, then everybody
has to do it. It’s an exponential effect. Next, say there are two stories, but there’s
only time for one. The first is on a brand new vaccine, a miracle
cure, something that will improve one’s odds of survival by 50%. The second is on a crime wave, a shooting
spree, something that’ll decrease the odds of survival by 5%. In this theoretical environment, that second
story wins: it’s scarier, it’s more dramatic, it’s going to keep the eyeballs from switching
to that other channel. This will kill people. The crime wave might stop, the attention might
lead to intervention, but all the while, more people are dying of a preventable disease,
an epidemic that could have been stopped if only people had heard of that new miracle
cure. In our heads, problems feel far more significant
than potential: we’d much rather solve a problem than capture potential. Early in the COVID pandemic, there was no
news but COVID news, but not all was negative: there were times when things got better. For every upslope there was a downslope, but
you could hardly tell based on the news. Research into the matter found that the degree
of negativity of COVID news had little… in fact sometimes inverse correlation with
the COVID case count at the given moment. This meant that, while a news consumer might
have theoretically known that things were comparatively better or worse, it didn’t
necessarily feel that way since the tone of the media inputs stayed consistently dire. This did have an impact. Now, with retrospect, we understand the cost
of COVID precautions. Precautions got in the way of precautions:
the persistence of mask mandates and school closures and border restrictions led to a
changing calculus of when these should have been implemented in the public’s minds. Think of it like this: if a town will have
only tolerated 12 months of mask mandates over 36 months of the pandemic, they probably
should have been applied here, as hospitalizations and deaths were rising most quickly, but rather,
on average, they were applied here: at the start, just stretching until tolerance waned,
meaning a limited supply of precaution was wasted on times when cases were naturally
waning. Of course this sort of rationality can only
be applied in retrospect, but it demonstrates the impact: we were incapable of properly
assessing risk perhaps in part because our information inputs didn’t modulate tone
in step with the risk. Things always felt at their worst, so it never
felt like the moment for a reprieve. Take another dramatically different example:
research has demonstrated that US presidents, in elections for a second term, are penalized
more for a worsening economy than rewarded for an improving one. That’s to say: making the economy 5% worse
matters a lot more to the electorate than making the economy 5% better, possibly because
the public hardly knows when things are getting better: the media doesn’t talk about it,
only the reverse. But what the electorate should optimize for
is the president who is best at improving the economy and so this skew means there’s
ever so slight irrationality in how we assess a politician. We’ve potentially voted out presidents,
and more often other politicians, irrationally because we don’t have an understanding of
their accomplishments: it’s a game of who’s more terrible rather than who’s the best.
So the news operates as perhaps a distorted
funhouse mirror of society. It is mostly accurate, it mostly conveys the
truth, but weighting matters. The public makes inferences based on the quantity
and frequency of information, and so this distorted mirror does inject irrational information
into both democratic and individual decision-making. There are interventions: we know this, because
we know this negativity bias is at its worst in the US. Australia and the UK, for example, are close
cultural cousins to the US, and yet their media tends to be far less negative. Perhaps the most notable difference in their
media landscape is the dominance of public broadcasters. The Australian and British Broadcasting Corporations
are incredibly influential in shaping public opinion in their respective countries, and
do so without needing to so fiercely compete to attract eyeballs. They can optimize for quality of information
over eyeballs attracted as their funding is less directly tied to quantity of eyeballs. They each rely on money from the public, funded
through the government, meaning the metric of success is providing a service the public
considers worthwhile. But inevitably, everyone’s definition of
worthwhile is different. True autonomy from the government, while relying
on politicians to continue to authorize funding, is near-impossible to achieve, and public
broadcasters constantly face scandals for failing to properly critique those who write
their checks. So while negativity might be lower, some might
ask at what cost. True media autonomy is essentially impossible
under a public funding model, true tone balance is essentially impossible under an ad-supported
model: there’s really no perfect option, and at the end of the day, it’s not a question
of if there’s negativity bias, just how much. When we look into a distorted funhouse mirror,
we don’t think our heads actually look that big or our stature is actually that short
or our hips are actually that wide because we know that’s not reality. We’ve seen ourselves in normal mirrors so
we know what we actually look like. But if you never saw yourself through a normal
mirror, if the funhouse option was it, you might know that your head and height and hips
are not that size, but slowly, you’d forget by just how much. You’d forget what you actually look like:
blind to yourself, left only with the choice of avoiding the mirror, rejecting any sort
of self-reflection, or accepting a flawed image because it’s really the only mirror
you have. Access to information is undoubtedly important,
and there has perhaps never been a more powerful tool for this than the internet. But as the power of the internet has increased,
there’s been a worrying trend towards its nationalization. The internet should be the exact same no matter
where you are, but it’s not: there are an increasing number of censorship firewalls,
legislation limiting where you can access what, and different versions of sites depending
on the country. I encounter this all the time when researching
for videos: sometimes I’m trying to watch a British news report on YouTube that’s
blocked in the US, or read an American website while traveling in Europe that’s blocked
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