Reporters ignored good news and stoked panic. Some people will pay for it with their lives and livelihoods.
Reporters ignored good news, mangled the facts, and stoked panic — and some people (but probably not reporters) will pay for it with their lives and livelihoods.
‘S o, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror,” said President Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugural address in 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression
There’s been an unrelenting torrent of bad news about the coronavirus. It’s a pandemic, so you’d expect downbeat coverage.
But a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper says the media here in the U.S. went too far and created a climate of fear and even panic. In a paper entitled “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” scholars from Dartmouth College and Brown University analyzed the tone of COVID-19-related news articles written since January 1.
They found a big difference in the way the elite U.S. media covered the pandemic compared with media in other countries:
“Ninety-one percent of stories by U.S. major media outlets are negative in tone versus 54 percent for non-U.S. major sources and 65 percent for scientific journals,” the authors concluded. “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.”
Indeed, people were actively misinformed about what was important about the virus. “Stories discussing President Donald Trump and hydroxychloroquine are more numerous than all stories combined that cover companies and individual researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines,” the authors note.
They found a “similar disconnect” when it comes to U.S. media reporting on the reopening of schools. They note:
The reporting is overwhelmingly negative, while the scientific literature tells a more optimistic story. Oster (2020) collects data on school reopenings and COVID-19 infections within schools and districts.
She finds that infection rates among students remain low (at 0.14 percent) and schools have not become the super-spreaders many feared. Guthrie et al (2020) and Viner et al (2020) review the available evidence and reach similar conclusions. However, 90 percent of school reopening articles from U.S. mainstream media are negative versus only 56 percent for the English-language major media in other countries.
Then there was the amazing inability of the media to report accurately on the development of the vaccine.
The NBER authors review the recent history:
On February 18th, the Oxford Mail published a story that Professor Sarah Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford’s Jenner Institute were working on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus and that rapid vaccine development could be possible given the scientists’ existing work and experience with a possible MERS vaccine. In contrast to Oxford Mail’s reporting, the U.S. major media outlets of Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post did not begin coverage of Professor Gilbert’s COVID-19 related work until late April. The U.S. based stories emphasized caveats from health officials and experts downplaying the optimistic timeline and past success of the Oxford researchers. The earliest available (major outlet) U.S. story is from CNN on April 23rd and begins with a quote from England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty saying that the probability of having a vaccine or treatment “anytime in the next calendar year” is “incredibly small.”
Instead, the announcement of not one, but two promising vaccines was made a bit more than six months later.
This imbalance in media coverage has created a climate of fear that has real consequences. Millions of children have skipped their routine vaccinations this year. The consequent drop in immunizations will leave every community in the U.S. in greater danger of such highly contagious diseases as measles, whooping cough, and even polio.
The same type of fear-based response led to elective surgeries being canceled by either patients or the hospitals scheduled to conduct them. As the Foundation for Economic Education concludes:
Basic virology went out the window as 15 days to flatten the curve devolved into a mad idea that we must close down society and shelter from the virus, unleashing unprecedented restrictions on economic freedom and destroying untold numbers of lives and livelihoods in the process.
This is the power of fear.
Roosevelt’s warnings against unreasonable fear are viewed as one of the great acts of leadership in U.S. history. Sadly, the power of fear this year overcame his good example with too much of the media — and the American people.