Gee New York Times, I Wonder Why There Was All That Negativity

The New York Times has a daily email service, The Morning Newsletter  chock-full of all sorts of right-thinking (or is that left-thinking) progressive analysis about the news.

I like to read it to see what the progressive explanation of events, lack of same,  or wish list du jour might be.

So, imagine my surprise with today's top article: Bad News Bias.

Sadly, when you click the link you'll likely hit a paywall, so I'll only except the portion I'm discussing from the email received.

The article title: Good morning. The U.S. media is offering a different picture of Covid-19 from science journals or the international media, a study finds.

The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity,” Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me.

About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

 Of course, there's no reflection in the article as to why the mainstream media might, perchance, have wanted to convey a message that things were far more negative and worse than they actually were during a presidential election year when Trump was in office.  Nope, none at all.

The author of the newsletter does however note : 

If we’re constantly telling a negative story, we are not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality. We are shading it.

Nice that he gets to that point a little late in the game. 

So, of course, now that the damage is done,  he states he's glad the study gives the media a chance to do better and they'll likely endeavor to shade things more positively, just in time for the Biden-Harris administration.

Funny how that consistently just happens that way.  See for example look to the media's coverage of "Kids in cages" under Trump vs "Kids in surge facilities" or even better "Kids? What kids? There is no problem to cover" under Obama and now Biden. See also how there's now a severe dearth of coverage of the current crisis at the border.

Not surprised that its happening but rather surprised that they're admitting to this kind of biased coverage, even as they explain it away as blaming the audience for wanting to see negative things. Still its a surprise to see they are admitting it was occurring, even a little bit - bit of course they'll use it to apologize for their negative bias and promise to be all positive for Biden-Harris.