[Trivia: What are the only two infectious diseases that people have eradicated? Hint: only one of the diseases infects human beings.]
I actually like journalism. The earliest-back thing I can remember wanting to be when I grew up was a journalist. I pillory and analyze bad media coverage, especially from the established outlets that should know better, a lot on this site, but that’s not because I hate journalists. I just hate when journalism is done badly.
That means voicing fair criticism and refraining from unfair. And as the old saying goes, “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” (I’ve seen different origins for this quote. Bartlett’s 14th Edition attributes it to someone named John B. Bogart.) This means that unusual news stories will get covered more often, and from the proportion of news coverage (paradoxically?) people will think that they’re more common than they are.
This comes to mind because Nate Silver’s pointed out two occasions recently of the media aiding and abetting this misimpression past what’s excusable.
About a month ago, he criticized an NBC story for trying to fight the narrative that Florida is a raging success by profiling people who’d moved there and then changed their minds:
Look, I’m not entirely against dog-bites-man type stories where you profile people who are going against some prevailing trend. If I was an editor for one of the local papers in the state, I’d probably bite on a story pitch along the lines of “Lots of people are moving to Florida — But these people are leaving.”
The NBC story leaves a false impression, however, partly by relying on anecdotal evidence — I would like to have seen some due diligence on the woman who said she had a tumor that doctors refused to operate on. But mostly because it implies that the rate of “movers’s remorse” in Florida is high. And statistically, it isn’t.
More recently, he zeroed in on the coverage of the youth vote vis-a-vis Biden’s student loan cancelation initiatives and Israel/Palestine:
Speaking of which, as you can see from [a poll ranking various issues’ importance to voters], “Israel/Palestine” and even climate change also ranked as issues of relatively low importance to young voters. The Middle East may be the exception that proves the rule — even if relatively few people care about it, those who do are obviously extremely passionate about it, and I don’t think people are bluffing when they say it could swing their votes. However, the reporting often treats protests on elite college campuses, or social media posts from articulate activists, as though they’re a proxy for the youth vote overall. Young voters do differ from older ones on some issues, including Israel-Palestine and free speech. But they do not care about these issues nearly as much as they care about more basic stuff like the economy and health care.
(Emphasis added.)
All of this stems from a simple problem of bias: if a journalist wants to promote a position, it’s not hard to give lots of attention and airtime to the people making that case. And if the journalism profession selects from a population with where fringe positions and an activist attitude are common, that’s setting the industry up for problems.
This is more subtle than style book admins enforcing language that favors some people while dehumanizing others. (Tangentially, the New York Times used the language on April 21 of “Anti-abortion supporters,” which pushes the limits of coherence.) Whole narratives and historical epochs are made real in people’s minds because they are chronicled in real time or not.
For instance, two months ago a 26-year-old nonbinary Antifa activist bombed the office of Alabama’s Attorney General. Somehow, actions speaking louder than words, that wasn’t considered news.
~
Answer: Smallpox and rinderpest.