You’ll Never Guess Which Country’s Media Has Covered COVID-19 Most Negatively

Quick, think about the last news story focused on the coronavirus pandemic that you either read, heard, or watched from a US media outlet. Was it overwhelmingly negative in tone? Was it mostly positive? Some unsatisfying convergence of the two?

All of us probably already know the answer to that question, no matter who’s on the receiving end of that query. The tone of all the reportage especially lately has been staggeringly dire, portending if not a state of calamitous near-ruin then a miasma of sickness and death that strains the nation’s health care infrastructure to the breaking point. The websites of major US newspapers and magazines track the cases, hospitalizations, and death trends in real time. The biggest outlets with the most resources — like The Atlantic, thanks to the heroic journalism of writers like Ed Yong — produce compelling, necessary work, like Yong’s recent piece titled “No One is Listening to Us.” It is a stirring, exhaustively reported and gripping account of how stretched thin health care workers now find themselves. Taken together, the work is a collective portrait of institutional failure, and of failings still to come — which news stories lately have duly reminded us will follow the neglect of travel warnings over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Still, a group of professors recently decided to probe an interesting question — to take a closer look at the US news media’s coverage of the pandemic to see if a hypothesis they’d come up with stood up to academic scrutiny. As Dartmouth College economics professor Bruce Sacerdote explained it to MarketWatch, early on in the pandemic “we were doing lots of staying home and social distancing, and you could see the case numbers coming down. And I and my co-authors are watching the TV obsessively, and the news isn’t getting any better.”

So he and two colleagues — Ranjan Sehgal of Dartmouth and Molly Cook of Brown University — decided to embark on a study analyzing all this in a serious way. Has coverage of the pandemic in the US been largely negative in tone?

It’s not an unreasonable line of inquiry, in spite of the fact that your first inkling might be to counter with the following — the cases, the COVID-19 death rates, all of that just is what it is, right? Shouldn’t it follow that negative media coverage of the pandemic appropriately reflects the fact that we’re in, you know, a global pandemic?

There is some degree of usefulness, though, in understanding the tenor of news media coverage of the pandemic, because we peer through it as a kind of looking glass onto the crisis itself, which in turn informs the media coverage that follows, and on and on that circle turns. For example, alarmist coverage from a local newspaper that COVID numbers are spiking again (like this Arizona news report declaring that COVID numbers there have seen their biggest one-week jump of the pandemic) might send some local residents scurrying back inside, to hunker down and ride out the resurgence — while others might scoff and declare this all another display of media overkill. Which is to say, the media coverage has real-world impact, for good or otherwise.

As you might can guess, the researchers found overwhelming negativity in the mainstream media coverage of the pandemic in the US. Not surprising, right? Especially when we’re the epicenter of the global crisis right now, with the latest Johns Hopkins University numbers showing that, among other things, more coronavirus cases have been identified in the US than anywhere else in the world (more than 12.7 million, as of the time of this writing).

Among the findings of the professors’ analysis, which focused on the amount of words considered to be negative in a story in articles written since January 1:

• 91% of stories by US major media outlets about COVID-19 were considered to be negative

• 54% of non-US major media stories were regarded as negative

• And 65% of articles from scientific journals were regarded as negative

“The negativity of the US major media is notable even in areas with positive scientific developments including school re-openings and vaccine trials,” an abstract of the researchers’ study reads. “Media negativity is unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases or the political leanings of the audience. US major media readers strongly prefer negative stories about COVID-19, and negative stories in general. 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.”

What’s more, among US major media outlets, the researchers found that stories discussing President Trump and hydroxychloroquine were more numerous than all stories combined.

Interestingly, the reporters come to a very nuanced conclusion — that the prevalence of negative coronavirus news is not solely the product of, yes, how utterly terrible the US response to the pandemic has been. One theory is that the pandemic is so inextricably linked to President Trump’s handling of the virus, so the negative media coverage is a kind of extension of coverage of the president. At the same time, there is nevertheless a certain degree of hopefulness that’s come out of this year, in spite of everything — such as the unprecedented timeframe for which new vaccines and therapeutics have been developed.

To be sure, this is a question that pales in comparison to the rapacious destruction of the coronavirus pandemic across the US and the broken lives it’s left in its wake — it can seem almost besides the point to note that there is, in fact, a degree of usefulness in knowing some of this about media coverage in the US. To sort of know what you’re getting on the front end, so that you don’t only mentally calibrate yourself to wherever the media is at right now. Part of getting to whatever awaits us on the other side of this once-in-a-generation health crisis is not just getting there in one piece, but keeping our wits about us as we make the journey. Doomscrolling an endless list of depressing news about lives lost as a result of the virus or the fact that Congress is no closer to passing a much-needed new stimulus bill only perpetuates the misery.

Heck, the CDC itself has warned against consuming too much COVID-19 media coverage in the US (“Take breaks from watching, reading, or listening to news stories, including those on social media,” the agency warns. “Hearing about the pandemic repeatedly can be upsetting”). You don’t say.