U.S. News

News Blues: Is the Media too Negative?

By David Brody
CBN News

CBN.com – If you watch today's 24/7 cable news long enough, you are bound to get a little depressed. Stories abound about how cell phone radiation may give you cancer, or whether your food is safe to eat? Beware of the killer West Nile virus and the bird flu, or the impending doom of global warming.

"I have stopped eating. I have stopped drinking. I rarely breathe any longer because I'm going to hear something on television telling me that I've done something that's about to kill myself,” said Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center.

"A part of me wants an avian flu epidemic to occur just so we can get it over with. After all, these years of predicting the blasted thing," he said.

So why is the media so negative? Why does the focus have to be on the doom and gloom?

"There is the old song that says that good news is no news. Bad news is great news," Bozell explained. "In the final analysis, it is all about ratings."

And the public knows it. Two out of every three Americans, 66 percent, believe that news organizations care more about attracting a bigger audience than they do about keeping the public informed.

"We seek to entertain an audience rather than enlighten an audience," Bozell said.

So ratings are important but how much of all of this is fact or fiction? Is the world such a dangerous and depressing place?

Well, the answer is: not really. On closer inspection, we see that what passes for a crisis in the media is really not a crisis at all.

Let's take a trip down memory lane. Remember 2001? That was the dreaded "summer of the shark." The media went wild with coverage of a handful of horrific shark attacks. But actually, attacks were down in 2001. There were 50 compared to 52 the year before.

In 2002, the media focused heavy attention on children being abducted and murdered by strangers. Some media outlets called it the "summer of abduction." It turns out this happens roughly 100 times a year, - 100 times too many. However, there are about 80 million kids under the age of 18. The chances of an abduction happening to your child are roughly one in a million.

How about the West Nile virus? Remember: people were dying and we needed to be concerned? Well, actually less than 1 percent of people who become infected develop a severe illness. Most people get a fever and that's about it.

"The world for most people in the United States is really quite safe, maybe the safest of any civilization in history," said David Altheide, a professor at the School of Justice at Arizona State University.

The professor has studied the idea of fear and the news media for quite some time and has written a book about it.

"The use of the word fear has increased tremendously," Altheide said.

Altheide has tracked how often the word “fear" is used in the media and in what context. It turns out that the word fear seems to pop up right next to a couple other words: children and schools.

"Fear enters our vocabulary in strange ways,” he said. “Now instead of somebody saying, for example, ‘I am concerned about x happening,’ they'll say ‘I fear x is going to happen.’ So fear has become very commonplace in our language."

You really see fear most in crime stories. Just watch your local newscast for a few minutes and you may think that crime seems to be everywhere. News executives admit covering crime is cheap, fast and efficient so you see more of it.

But let's look at the figures. In the 1990s, the national murder rate fell by 20 percent. But the number of murder stories on network newscasts rose roughly 600 percent.

"The things that are most rare are the ones we really worry about,” Altheide said. “And a lot of this simply has to do that they're sensationalized, they're personalized, we see a lot of repeated stories about them."

Altheide said when we see stories often enough, especially crime and victim stories, we start to change our lifestyle. We don't go out as much. We'll choose more gated communities, high walls, no windows. Mace and handgun sales increase. Overall, Americans start to believe we live in a world where things are "out of control."

"I place an awful lot of blame on the mainstream media, partly because they are trying to generate audiences and profits more than providing solid information," Altheide said.

Speaking of solid information, no one can seem to figure out global warming. Remember this Time magazine coverage: "Be worried. Be very worried." But what about 30 years ago when some in the media said there was an impending ice age?

"They can't decide which chaos it is. One moment they're declaring as fact that there's global warming. The next moment they turn around and say it's a matter of fact that there's global cooling," Bozell said.

Bozell said that it is hard to trust the media on many subjects, especially when a liberal national press covers a conservative administration. He thinks a big part of it is bias. Take the war in Iraq for example. The Media Research Center showed how over a three week period, the big three networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, spent three and a half hours on stories related to U.S. military misconduct. Just 52 minutes were spent on the military's heroic deeds. And that wasn't over a three week period – that was over five years.

"If three hours and thirty minutes was the appropriate amount of time to spend, what would be the appropriate amount of time to spend during that same time period on heroism?” Bozell asked.

When the U.S. military killed Zarqawi in Iraq, instead of focusing on the good news, there were stories about whether this will fuel new terrorism, whether it was really good news, or whether it would help the president's sagging poll numbers?

Bozell said you also see this with the economy.

"It's a laughable proposition. You'll see reporters hailing the Clinton numbers when they came out and taking those same numbers and talking about a downward trend in the economy when Bush comes out with them,” he said.

Add this bias with the media's desire to attract an audience, and you have questions from a skeptical public wondering what is fact and what is fiction.

"We don't want them to be cynical,” Altheide said. “We don't want them to disbelieve everything they hear. We don't want people to say that if it’s in the media, they're never right. That's not true at all."

But the problem exists. Which brings to mind the idea of responsibility: to whom much is given, much is expected.

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