Freakonomics Radio - Why Is U.S. Media So Negative? (Ep. 477 Replay)

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Breaking news! Sources say American journalism exploits our negativity bias to maximize profits, and social media algorithms add fuel to the fire. Stephen Dubner investigates.

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. For the past couple of weeks, we have been revisiting our series on the unique aspects of American culture, from our rugged individualism to our spirit of competition. This week, we will ask one more question in this realm. Why is U.S. media so negative? If you'd like to catch up on the rest of the series or you want to listen to any of our episodes, you can find it all on any podcast app and our entire archive is also available at Freakonomics.com along with transcripts and show notes. As always, thanks for listening.

I'd like you to imagine, and this shouldn't be very hard, but imagine you were in the midst of a growing pandemic. A 12th fatality has now been reported here in the United States. ER doctors saying we are on the verge of a medical disaster. And let's say you want to be as informed as possible. The daily coronavirus death toll in the United States might hit 3,000 by early June. The coronavirus forcing millions more Americans into virtual lockdown. This dangerous health crisis could dovetail quickly into a political crisis. And now let's say you are an economics professor watching this news for hours a day.

How does the information you're getting add to your understanding of the pandemic? I honestly thought I was going crazy. The economist in question here is Bruce Sasserdote at Dartmouth College. I'm very utilitarian, and I was looking for useful information, and hence my frustration,

because I felt like it was more advertorial and entertainment. When Sasserdote says he was looking for more useful information, what does that mean? What I would be looking for is, okay, there was this new study done, here's what they found, here's what this means for the pandemic, here's what this means for when we can get back to work. But instead, it tends to be a lot of angst and bemoaning the numbers, even if they hadn't changed or had gotten better. It wasn't that Sasserdote wanted to pretend that everything was fine. I mean, this thing killed more people than most of the wars we've been in. And so it's hard not to be knocked down by that. But Sasserdote saw a difference between being knocked down and wallowing. He began to wonder if the news coverage of the pandemic was commensurate with the pandemic itself,

and whether the coverage he was seeing, mostly from major U.S. media outlets, whether it was perhaps more negative than other coverage, like local news or international news, or even the articles published in scientific journals. All of them were seeing the same COVID-19 story unfold, but were the major U.S. media outlets selling a more negative version of the story? And if so, what were the ramifications? Sasserdote wasn't quite alone in his concern. The Centers for Disease Control issued a warning about media consumption. Take breaks from watching, reading, or listening to news stories, including those on social media, the CDC said.

It's good to be informed, but consider limiting news to just a couple times a day. Now, Sasserdote, remember, is an economist, not an epidemiologist or a public health scholar. So he also wondered how the economic setup of the U.S. media industry was driving the tone of the coverage. We have been putting out a series of episodes lately about how the U.S. is fundamentally different from other countries. Did Bruce Sasserdote find another dimension on which the U.S. is an outlier? He decided to do what economists do. He started gathering data in order to produce a study. Well, that's what happens when you take an economist and lock them in front of CNN

for three months and make him more and more angry. Today on Freakonomics Radio, is your news negatively biased? Or should we just blame the English language? We have a lot of words for types of bad feelings. And let's not forget about social media. We found that moral words like evil or hate, these would also be linked to increased virality. Marshall McLuhan said it first more than 50 years ago.

The medium is the message. It's also been said that we call TV a medium because it is neither rare nor well done. Is that fair? Is it true? Is it time to answer these questions? Yes, it is. Right after the...

Here, womp it with me. Womp, womp, womp. Womp, womp, womp. Womp, womp, womp. Womp, womp, womp. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side or journalism, where I do, you are generally considered a more serious person if you are critical or even negative, whereas positivity tends to be associated with naivete or cheerleading.

Yeah, that's probably right. So Sasserdote, who is generally an optimist, sometimes feels like an outlier. I had this idea of getting together a merry band of people who actually believe that there's economic growth and that poor people are becoming better off in the U.S., even if not as fast a rate as rich people, etc., etc. And I wonder if having people like that band together could be more effective than one or two voices crying in the wilderness. It's interesting that when it comes to the business world, and particularly the high-tech world, I think there is plenty of optimism. And certainly investors. I mean, you look at companies like Tesla and Amazon that exist in part because investors subsidize their

operations with the optimism that 10 years down the road that the big payoff is coming. So there's an interesting dichotomy there, right? It is true that tech investors can be incredibly optimistic, sometimes to a fault. How optimistic should you be if you're investing in media firms? It depends. Newspapers are, for the most part, a bad bet. Over the past 15 years or so, the digital revolution has upset what used to be a very profitable apple cart. U.S. newspaper revenues fell from around $60 billion a year to $20 billion. But cable TV is doing great. At the big three, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, revenues continue to grow and their profit margins are massive. CNN, for instance,

earned an estimated $715 million in profit in 2020 on revenue of just $1.6 billion. It's not only a for-profit enterprise, but it's highly profitable, and it's a big market they can segment. And while technology markets thrive on optimism, Sasserdote began to suspect that major media outlets thrive on pessimism. The media is very good at producing negative stories that are eye-catching. They're also good at producing stories which cater to people's existing tastes and fears. Fear-mongering, we should say, is not new.

Journalism does span a wide spectrum, but the most crowd-pleasing outlets have long followed a simple mantra, if it bleeds, it leads. And Sassardot argues that this instinct is particularly strong in the U.S. Essentially, the U.S. major media is better at giving people what they want. They're particularly talented and profit-maximizing. How did he reach this conclusion? It was the result of a huge research project done in collaboration with Molly Cook and Ranjan Sehgal.

They set out to analyze COVID news coverage in four distinct categories, major U.S. media, local and regional U.S. media, international media outlets, and scientific journals. All told, they analyzed 43,000 stories, including journal and newspaper articles and cable TV transcripts. They used machine learning algorithms and what Sashadote calls very simple word counting techniques to measure how negative or positive a given story was. This measurement relied on the use of two lexicons popular with researchers, a list of nearly 5,000 words judged to be negative and another list of positive words, just over 2,000 of them. Perhaps the difference in size between these two lexicons should have been a clue.

Here are some of the words from the negative lexicon. Appalling. Barbaric. Catastrophe. Dangerous. Nefarious. Recklessness. Stagnate.

Troublesome. Worsen. And some words from the positive lexicon. Applaud, appreciate, expansive, gaining, ready, winnable. The researchers focused their analysis on COVID coverage because that's what Satchito was interested in. But the particulars of the pandemic also allowed them to sharpen their analysis, since the virus hit different places at different times. This meant they could use

local COVID trends as a control tool to isolate and measure the tone of the media coverage. So what'd they find? It doesn't seem to be driven by the trend in cases that much, and that's really disturbing, right? Because when the news is terrible, I expect terrible reporting, but we counted up the number of negative and positive stories, both in times when cases are rising, when cases are falling. And when cases are rising, negative stories outnumber positive ones seven to one or six and a half to one. And then when cases are plummeting, it's still five and a half to one negative stories to positive stories. I mean, that's really upsetting.

So you write that about 87% of COVID coverage in national US media last year was negative. The share for international media was only 51%. So that's a massive, massive difference. Only 53% in US regional media. So again, huge difference. And then 64% in scientific journals. So that's really interesting to me because I guess it has to do with the difference in mission between journalism and scientific journals. What do

you make of that headline number, 87% negativity in national U.S. media versus 64% negativity in scientific journals overall. Of course, it's not proof positive because, as you say, these entities have different missions. But to us, it's pretty astounding. It's like, look, yeah, there's bad news about COVID and maybe, you know, some of those scientific articles are about spread and those sort of things. But on the other hand, there's a good 40% that are finding good things. The positive scientific news just doesn't get out there. And often when it gets out there in the mainstream media, it gets kind of botched. For example, think about how the vaccine timeline was covered early on. Here is a New York Times

headline from April 29th, 2020. Trump seeks push to speed vaccine despite safety concerns. And here's a passage from that article. President Trump is pressing his health officials to pursue a crash development program for a coronavirus vaccine that could be widely distributed by the beginning of next year, despite widespread skepticism that such an effort could succeed and considerable concern about the implications for safety. Now, we should say the New York Times' coverage of President Trump was almost uniformly critical. So maybe it's not surprising that its coverage of the Trump administration's vaccine efforts might also be critical. But the Times was just one of the 14 major U.S. media outlets in this

analysis. Here, meanwhile, is a headline from one of the foreign outlets the researchers analyzed. This is the Oxford Mail in England in February of 2020, also writing about vaccines. Scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine in Oxford. And a passage from that article. The Jenner Institute has been working on a vaccine against another coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, MERS, which has been shown to induce strong immune responses against MERS after a single dose of the vaccine in the first clinical trial which took place in Oxford. The same approach to making the vaccine is being taken for the novel coronavirus vaccine. So this is the kind of information that Bruce Sasserdote, the economist, would see later in his analysis. But at the time, Bruce Sasserdote, the human,

was back in Hanover, New Hampshire, watching a lot of CNN, reading a lot of the New York Times. I literally thought I was losing my mind. And I'm thinking, well, why am I putting faith in these scientists who say they can come up with a vaccine? Because the news clearly says they can't, that it takes five years to develop a vaccine. And then when the scientists and the companies actually came out with vaccines, I felt so relieved and, you know, less importantly vindicated that, hey, wait a minute, you know, the scientists were not lying. It's just that they weren't being given a full hearing. In the paper, you write that the most popular stories in The New York Times have high levels of negativity, particularly for COVID-19 related articles. So is the New York Times, just to use one example, more negative than others? The data suggests that the New York Times is more negative than the average regional or local paper or TV. And what can you tell us about which way the arrow points there?

In other words, do New York Times readers want and seek out negative news, or does the New York Times turn people negative? That's a great question, and I'm sorry to say we don't have the answer. It would almost be less worrying if people demand negativity and the New York Times supplies it. And we're picking on the New York Times, but that name stands in for all the U.S. major media, it would be less disturbing if it were simply that people demand negativity, they get it, the end.

What worries me is that it's a self-reinforcing cycle. In other words, it could be that the bad news delivered by major U.S. media outlets increases our appetite for bad news, and in order to maintain its audience, those outlets in turn deliver even more bad news. performed a sentiment analysis on every article the Times published between 1945 and 2005. He found that coverage began drifting negative in the 1960s and has gotten progressively more so. But which way does the arrow point? Do news outlets simply meet our demand for negativity, or do they create that demand? It has been well-documented by academic researchers that humans do have a built-in negativity bias. The social psychologist Roy

Baumeister calls it the power of bad, and he says it can serve a valuable function. If you miss out on a great opportunity for good food or sex or any other life-affirming thing, well, okay, that's too bad, but you might have another one the following day. But if you miss out on a dangerous predator, fail to notice, that will put an end to your life. Part of the psychological mechanism underlying our work is that the mind was shaped by evolution to pay attention to risk. So how does the power of bad, an ancient psychological mechanism, intersect with how the New York Times conveys information? To understand that, it helps to first understand how the English language has been shaped by this negativity bias. It's certainly the case in language that negativity heightens emotion and it heightens the impact of what you're saying. That is Erica Okrent. I'm a linguist. I write about

language and I'm the author of Highly Irregular, about why English is so weird. Weird in some simple, relatively harmless ways, like spelling. One example from Okrent, consider the following three words, D-O-U-G-H, T-O-U-G-H, and T-H-R-O-U-G-H. Other than the opening letters, they're identical. So why don't they sound identical? Why are they pronounced dough, tough, and through?

But the weird spelling in English isn't nearly as complicated as the weird emotions, especially the negative ones. Well, we have more ways of being negative. We have a lot of words for types of bad feelings. We have, you know, guilt. We have shame. Those are very specific. They're different from sad. They're different from down and depressed. And there are definitely lots of ways of being positive or happy, but the vocabulary you have for it, there aren't very specific ones that are like that particular type of joy you feel when you sit down to a meal that looks really good or, you know, something very specific like that.

I have to say, this is a little distressing to me because one of the most famous lines in literature is the first sentence of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I've always thought that was such a bad caricature that happiness must have as much variety as unhappiness. But you are telling me, basically, no surprise, Tolstoy's right, I'm wrong. Well, you can definitely describe different types of happiness, but we tend to do a long description to get exactly what we're talking about. We don't have the word that sums it all up in one package. There's a default, and this is how we expect things to be, and then there's a marked situation. And in language, the marked situation

is the one that gets the name, because it's a departure, especially with verbs. We have the verb to lie, lying. We do not have a verb for to tell the truth. We have a whole phrase. We can say, oh, he's being a straight shooter, but we have one word for lying. You know, what's the opposite of speeding, of littering, of murdering? That's what we're supposed to be doing. We don't need to name it. We're just going along with it. When we consume media, how do you think the negativity of the headline language shapes our react to the events and how urgently we feel that reaction. Negativity puts you in a heightened state of awareness. And that heightened state of awareness is meant to spur you to action. The music also helps. You know, the music that CNN and other cable news networks play to make sure you know that their breaking news alert is really important.

Breaking news. Christians celebrate Christmas. These are real examples from CNN. The breaking news text is being read aloud by our producers. Breaking news. No winner yet in America's historic election. Breaking news. Titanic sunk 102 years ago tonight. We should also acknowledge that a lot of news is meant to alarm us. That's part of its purpose. And I know journalism is a business.

It's the business I've been in most of my adult life, including several years at The New York Times. But I've always thought of journalism as having a somewhat different mission from other industries. Yes, every writer and editor and producer wants their work to get attention and they want to be paid. But the argument being made by Bruce Sassardot goes beyond that. He says that the major American media outlets are primarily driven by profit maximizing and that the best way to profit maximize is by accentuating the negative. Yeah, that's kind of the sad truth. I do think that the realm you're in, the profession you're in, people expect a certain level of truth. And I think that they often get that.

And so I feel that some of that trust that had been built up over, let's say, 100 years is partially eroded because it is perhaps more of a business than it was in the 1950s. But in retrospect, doesn't that look like a kind of brief golden era? Because if you go further back to the late 19th century, the papers were... Oh, yeah, they were just rags, right? They were political rags, and they were very explicit about it. And if they were writing, you know, a paper about the British or about George Washington, it was just a personal attack. So for better or for worse, it's a business and people are getting what they want.

Do you know anything about how American the taste for negativity is? And assuming it is an anomaly, why that's the case? We take the opposite view on this, which is that it's not actually the people that are different, and I'll give you some data on that. If you look at the most Facebook shared and the most liked stories on, say, the New York Times or the BBC, the most liked things from the BBC are also super neg. It's just the BBC is not supplying nearly as much of those super negative stories. What we, my co-authors and I, think is going on is it's not that Americans are fundamentally different than the British or the French or the Italians. We think what's going on is the

structure of the industry is different in these different places. The U.S. major media outlets explicitly focus on the negative because we believe that's what drives viewership and clicks and keeps people staying on the page or on the show. Okay, but why would that not be the case in France or England or Australia? In most of those other countries, you have a big public player, like the BBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. As a libertarian-leaning person, you'd think I wouldn't be pounding the table for public interference in this industry. But I think in this industry, they have less of a profit motive, and they're somewhat less motivated by driving clicks and engagement, and somewhat more motivated by the truth. Sasserdote's study covered just 2020 from January 1st until December 31st. So it did include the beginning of the vaccine rollout, but it ended before Joe Biden became president. Sasserdote did look for a relationship between the political bias of a given news outlet and its tendency to run negative news.

He didn't find any. But you could imagine that Donald Trump's contentious presidency may have affected the overall tone of media coverage in 2020. I certainly feel like the negativity is somewhat less pounding than it was six months ago, even in the face of this horrible rise of this variant. So then it does make you take pause and say, well, maybe

part of it was the political environment we were in. But Sasserdote thinks his research findings are more generalizable than that. We suspect this is much more than just a COVID story. We think that negativity about climate change, you know, pick any topic, unemployment, inequality, poverty alleviation. We think that the media coverage, particularly from the national media, is probably more negative than it is in other countries. Why is this important, other than the psychic damage that so much negativity can cause. Here's one reason. If all you're being told by the media is that problem X is bad and getting worse, and that problem Y is even more unsolvable, well, you may start believing it. You may start believing that we are collectively terrible at solving problems, and it's probably

not even worth trying. Whereas the reality is that collectively, we humans, I mean, are actually quite good at solving problems. Yes, it's hard, but it's made even harder when the only stories that gain traction are the stories telling us that those problems can't be solved. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, wait a minute, there is one newish sector of the media that is practically devoid of negativity. Social media. Everything on social media is puppies and rainbows, isn't it? One example of a very viral post said, check out Joe Biden's recent brain freeze. After the break, additional negativity evidence from Twitter and Facebook. And we do look for solutions to America's media negativity.

Warning, it won't be easy. You don't see the moderate broadcasting corporation starting up and gathering viewers like crazy. It's coming up right after this. If you like this podcast, please let a friend know about it. That is a great way to support the podcasts you like. We'll be right back. There's a famous saying in poker. When you're sitting at the table and you can't tell who's the sucker, the sucker is you. Here's another version updated for our digital age. If you are spending a lot of time online and you can't tell what the product is,

the product is you. The entire social media business model is based on capturing our attention in order to sell advertising. That is Steve Rathje. When we spoke with him, he was getting his PhD in psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is now a researcher at NYU. He studies misinformation and political polarization.

He also created a web app called Have I Shared Fake News? You input your Twitter handle and we'll show you specific news URLs that you have shared that have been considered by independent fact-checkers to share fake or unreliable information. As Rathjay said, the big social media sites are almost exclusively reliant on advertising dollars. In 2021, Twitter took in just over $5 billion in revenues. That same year, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, took in more than

$117 billion. This means that all the newspapers in America, even all the cable TV networks, could fit in Facebook's back pocket. And in a way, they do. More than half of all Americans get at least a portion of their news via social media, with one-third coming from Facebook. Here's what Steve Rathje wanted to know. If you are a social media site and your business is built around engagement in order to sell the most advertising possible, what's the best way to drive engagement? So Rathje, like Bruce Sasserdote, embarked on a big study. He and two co-authors, Sander van der Linden and Jay von Bavel, analyzed nearly 3 million social media posts to learn what makes a post more likely to attract other users. Their analysis covered the years 2016 to 2020.

They focused on posts from conservative and liberal media platforms and Republican and Democratic members of Congress. So what'd they find? What we found is that each additional word referring to the outgroup increased the number of retweets or shares of that post by 67%. The outgroup meaning someone on the other side of the political aisle. If a post was coming from a Democrat, a word like Republican or conservative would lead to increased virality. And if a post was coming from a Republican, a word like Joe Biden would lead to increased virality. The paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is called Outgroup Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media. Also, posts including words referring to an outgroup were also much more likely to receive

angry reactions, haha reactions, comments, and shares, whereas posts referring to an in-group were more likely to receive like or heart reactions on Facebook. But posts about the out-group receive much more engagement in total. And Steve, how confident are you that you and your co-authors are right? In other words, how empirical is this kind of research? I mean, we looked at eight separate data sets on Facebook and Twitter. So we are confident that we are right, especially about the specific point in history. Our general results were also replicated. Can you describe the two most viral posts in your entire massive data set? One example of a very viral post was from Breitbart News, and it said,

check out Joe Biden's recent brain freeze. And it was a very unflattering video of Joe Biden that, you know, made him look like he wasn't doing so well. And then another post that went very viral from the liberals was from the Daily Beast, and it was about Mike Pence blatantly lying about COVID-19. Let me just make sure I understand, Steve. What you're telling me is that when I tweet or post something on Facebook or pretty much anywhere, if I want to be successful, because here I am posting, I'm not here to be invisible, all I really need to do is focus on my outgroup and being negative about them, and I win, correct? Yeah, you might win in terms of engagement. You might not get people to like you,

but you know, if you have like a rival podcast or something, if you wanted to dunk on the rival podcast, that would probably get you a lot of engagement. So in my next series of tweets, I should say that Ira Glass's glasses are too big and he looks like a circus clown. You should try that. We should put that to the test. Can you help me get better at it? Like what are some kinds of words or emotions or actions to post about? Well, let's see. If we take from other research, so I was inspired by other research that also looked at the effect that moral outrage would have on virality. And we also replicated this effect as well. We found that moral words like evil or hate, or they could even be positive moral words like care. These would also be linked to increased

virality. So maybe if you express some moral outrage about Ira Glass. Yeah, I feel like Ira, like he is pretty nice. What about maybe, so Joe Rogan is a natural target as a competitor, but he could also just beat the s*** out of me, like, with one finger. So that's not a good idea, is it? Well, if you guys got into a feud on social media, that would probably drive a lot of engagement as well. So I'm okay with the feud on social media, but if it tips over into real life, I'm dead. That's true. When we published this study, we really wanted to make sure that this didn't come across as advice for people.

We wanted to emphasize that this reflected the perverse incentives of social media. These perverse incentives, as Rathjay categorizes them, are not universal. Just as journalism operates under different guidelines around the world, so too do Twitter

and Facebook. In China, for instance, social media content is tightly regulated, especially any posts about politics. Twitter is outright banned in China, although many people use virtual private networks to get around the ban. Some Chinese Twitter users have been jailed for criticizing the government. And during the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the government clamped down on social media activity

that documented what was happening in the city's hospitals. In the U.S., meanwhile, the government has been pretty much absent in regulating social media activity. The occasional high-profile banishment of a user like Donald Trump has come from the companies, not the government. But that may change as politicians on both sides have been calling for more regulation. Conservatives think that they're being censored.

Liberals are more concerned about misinformation. But we found that out outgroup negativity was equally likely to go viral for both Republicans and Democrats. And it was also equally likely to go viral on Facebook and Twitter. So I think one potential solution that both Republicans and Democrats could agree on is maybe we just shouldn't amplify this extremely negative content about our outgroups all the time. Imagine we're going back a couple thousand years and you're saying to a bunch of Roman senators, because, you know, they were at least as contentious as modern politicians, probably more so. And it'd be like going back then and saying, listen, you guys just shouldn't say

negative and especially mean things about the other people in this arena. Does that seem remotely realistic in whatever millennium we're talking? I think that what social media is taking advantage of is sort of an ancient instinct to pay attention to the negative or to the polarizing or divisive. But I think it is different now that there is the ability to algorithmically amplify this. They didn't have these outrage machines at that time

that would just amplify the most negative content. What is the payoff of all this attention? What do the politicians, for example, actually gain? I guess I'm asking you to prove that this virality has real measurable value. What we see is a lot of the most extreme politicians, if you look at Donald Trump, for instance, he was really good at taking advantage of Twitter to sort of get the spotlight constantly.

I mean, that's the narrative, but he also lost an election as an incumbent president, which isn't easy to do. So, of course, one narrative could say, well, he was great at social media and he was president because of social media. Another narrative could say, because he he was great at social media and he was president because of social media. Another narrative could say, because he was so hostile and negative, he lost an election. So that's what I'm asking, because attention for attention's sake isn't necessarily the goal.

So is there a way to actually measure the value of dunking on someone else? That's a good question, because certainly Joe Biden, he's not a big Twitter user. You could certainly take that perspective as well because dunking is certainly a double-edged sword. You will get yourself more attention, but you will also get yourself negative attention. There was a paper that shows that people don't really like when politicians are negative. Politicians can get more visibility, but they'll also be perceived as more unlikable. So it is sort of a game that they have to play. And what do you see or know about this same phenomenon, outgroup negativity, in totally non-political realms and even non-media realms?

Let's say it's, you know, one athlete on one team dunking on somebody on a different team? Or what about commercial products? If this phenomenon is so powerful, why is Coke not just constantly trashing Pepsi? When I look at the Coca-Cola official Twitter account, let's see, how many followers does Coca-Cola have? 3.3 million. So they're doing okay. Although I would think Coca-Cola, you could do more. And if I load the tweets back to November of 2020, and I search their timeline for the word Pepsi, I get zero. They're not engaging at all. So, if I were Coca-Cola, and I'm listening to Steve Rathjay, I would say, holy crap, we've been wasting this amazingly great opportunity to tell the people who love us that, I don't know,

Pepsi-Cola puts rat tails in their soda. Yeah, again, I'm not giving people the advice that everyone should go dunk on their outgroup right now. I do think that if they did do that, they would get more attention on Facebook and Twitter, but they might not get people to like them more. Coke has all these very positive commercials. They associate themselves with a positive image. So yeah, it's not the best tactic for getting people to like you. It is just sort of a rule of social media that it will get you more attention. I can't blame the platforms directly. That, again, is the economist Bruce Sesserdote. Certainly, I think one can blame social media platforms

for allowing completely false things to circulate. And so you can have a debate about that and the degree to which that might be regulated. But if there's a negative story in the New York Times, then people are going to want to share it on Facebook. And I mean, that's what the data show, what people do. According to Steve Rathje, that is pretty much the exact argument

that companies like Facebook and Twitter make when they are accused of using their algorithms to promote negative or even false information. But Rathje isn't persuaded. which suggests that social media amplifies the bad and it amplifies the ugly. And the good has a lot less of a chance of going viral. Social media isn't just this neutral public square in which people have debates. The most divisive or negative content will capture our attention. I guess if I'm Facebook or Twitter, though, I could say, well, both can be true in that we are a platform where people can say pretty much whatever they want to say, good, bad, neutral, etc. And then it comes down to preferences and what people actually want. So what's your evidence that the platforms are actually guilty of accentuating the negativity?

You could say that we want negativity because negativity is more likely to capture our attention. But I don't think that people actually want negativity in the long run. Some evidence for this comes from other research. There was another study by Hunt Alcott in which he paid people to delete their Facebook accounts for four weeks. And after those four weeks, people became less politically polarized and they actually reported better well-being. When we leave these platforms, we are often happier. I know you said you didn't write this paper to give advice for how to go viral on social media, but do you have suggestions for how to change the incentives that create this phenomenon? So I think that Facebook could make very subtle algorithmic tweaks to just make it so angry reactions cause less virality.

And perhaps heart reactions and like reactions lead to more virality. There is also other research by Katie Milcoman, for instance, that shows that high arousal positive emotions are likely to go viral as well. So if the algorithm was suddenly shifted, so we take advantage of viral positivity rather than viral negativity, that might be a potential solution. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. When you watch the coverage of the Olympics, it's almost as if negativity is barred,

especially if there's an American favorite who ends up doing very poorly. You pretty much never hear about it. When you see the features on the athletes, there's always the negative, but it is just the barrier which the athlete overcame to get to triumph. So if that's the tenor of coverage of an event like the Olympics, which is a pretty big global event and which is hugely profitable. Why on earth wouldn't I think that positivity has a lot of value and that negativity maybe is exciting and

fun, but kind of a loser's trap? Yeah, I don't know. Sorry, that wasn't really a question as much as a sermon. I apologize. But if you have anything to say about it, we should make social media more like the Olympics. Yeah. And I mean, there are some platforms. I think TikTok early on was taking advantage of viral positivity. And I think like YouTube in its early days

was a lot of very positive, uplifting videos. But recently we've seen like more controversies about the YouTube algorithm recommending conspiratorial or white supremacist videos. So I think it's a product of social media evolving with this business model of just constant engagement all the time. And yeah, the power of bad is a strong bias. Coming up after the break, is there a market for good news?

Maybe 10 years from now we'll come back and the media industry will have realigned itself and maybe for the better. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. The power of bad may indeed be a strong bias, but remember, it is not equally powerful in all domains. Here again is the Dartmouth economist Bruce Sasserdote. The data suggests that the New York Times is more negative than the average regional or local paper. Here again are the negativity numbers from the Sasserdote media study. 87% of COVID coverage in national U.S. media, like the New York Times, was negative. The negativity number for regional and local coverage?

Just 53%. So maybe there's room for some optimism? Probably not. Local newspapers do tend to go broke at an alarming rate. Since 2005, one in four local newspapers has shut down. So they may just simply not be as profit-maximizing. Another possibility is that they play a completely different role, you know, that they focus on local happenings.

And so when there's a fire, which is a very negative thing, you tend to get a lot of reporting about it, but they're not in the same business of getting people whipped up into a frenzy and getting a lot of clicks and attention and are less successful as a result. So this sounds like a losing formula. If you are a media outlet that doesn't promote negativity, you're more likely to go out of business. Yeah, it's a huge issue. There ought to be a market force for local and regional coverage. I mean, the good news is that we have all these new technologies for reaching people. We have all these less expensive ways to get

the word out there. And so maybe 10 years from now, we'll come back and the media industry will have realigned itself and maybe for the better. Sassardou has already admitted to being an optimist. So this may just be the optimism talking, but he does see an upside in media coverage that doesn't just bang on about a problem, but instead looks at the problem from multiple angles, maybe even explores a solution. For example. Look, there's all this vaccine hesitancy. Perhaps some of the vaccine hesitancy is actually because there wasn't as consistent a positive message about the vaccines, about the folks that were developing these vaccines,

and the public-private partnerships that created them with such speed. I certainly can't say that a huge fraction of vaccine hesitancy is down to that, but maybe some of it is. I think the entire attitude of the country towards the fight against COVID, but even the fight against inequality, against poverty, and the whole view of whether government works, I think we're way too pessimistic. I think we're way too pessimistic about our ability to fight climate change and to get off of fossil fuels. The alarm bells are deafening. We're way too pessimistic about our ability to beat back COVID and the next virus when that comes along. Americans are literally

too dangerous to be let out of our country. And we're way too pessimistic about our ability to get people out of poverty. This entire thing is and always has been a scam. And so it just bugs me. And I think this negativity is holding society back rather than looking at what we can do as opposed to what we've done poorly. There should be a market for like sensible moderates who believe like, yeah, government can work,

but it's not always the solution. And maybe we should care about the deficit too. You know, COVID is bad, but look at all the great things we've done. But oddly, you don't see the moderate broadcasting corporation starting up and gathering viewers like crazy. Although maybe that in a way, that's what you do. I know that's not exactly what you do, but you're kind of in that space. I was going to say I'm a little insulted because you're describing exactly what we try to do. On the other hand, you're right. I do not have the scale of what would be called the moderate broadcasting company. So maybe,

I don't know, maybe a name change is in order. But basically, you've told me if I have any self-interest at all, I'm being an idiot by not being much more negative. Do you have any ideas for names if I want to go the other way? Maybe I have a shadow network that's all negative all the time? You could go with constantly negative news, but that may be taken. Thanks to Bruce Sasserdote and his co-authors Molly Cook and Ranjan Sehgal for producing such interesting research. The paper is called Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News? Thanks also to Steve Rathjay and his co-authors, Sander van der Linden and Jay von Bavel. Their paper is called Outgroup Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media. And thanks to Erica Okren, whose latest book is called Highly Irregular, Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't R't rhyme and other oddities of the English language.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode or any episode. We are at radio at Freakonomics.com. Coming up next time on the show, should public transit be free? I cannot answer that without context. One big serving of free public transit context. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski. Our staff

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I was literally eating my feelings. So people complain about literally, but they don't complain about really. But it's the same thing. When I say I was really tearing my hair out, you weren't really doing it. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.