The Psychological Effects of News Coverage During Covid-19

Most news on TV is framed negatively. What are the subsequent psychological effects on viewers? And what steps can you take to manage your own feelings?

It is widely acknowledged that the emotional content of films and TV programs impacts our psychological health. It affects our moods which in turn impact our behaviour, mindset and many aspects of our thinking.

For example, when a TV program generates a negative mood such as sadness, that feeling will alter how you interpret events in your own life, which memories you recall, and how much you will worry about personal events.

I’ve long championed the fact that watching too much TV news is bad for our mental health. Unfortunately, the negative tone of TV news has been on the increase for many years. Combine this with the truly challenging times we are currently living through, and I feel it is time to constructively look at media news coverage through a psychology lens.

First, let’s define what negative news is: There are a lot of bad things that happen in the world, and it is right that people should know about these things. We should be aware of wars, famines, pandemics and many other serious issues.

The problem is that there is an increasing tendency for news broadcasters to dramatise and emotionalise their news (and views). Typically, they do this by emphasising the negative outcomes of a story no matter how low the risks of those negative outcomes might be. Just this morning, a BBC presenter became obsessed with the fact that 5% of self-employed people in the UK weren’t covered by the financial measures introduced by the government yesterday. Or to put it another way: Less than 24-hours ago, the UK government introduced measures to secure the future of 95% of self-employed people in the UK. Sounds somewhat different, eh?

The media are scaremongering at every available opportunity to sensationalise, dramatise and emotionalise the impact of the news.

With today's 24-hour news coverage, gone are the days when a reporter's role was simply to impartially 'report' what was happening in the world. Nowadays, a journalist’s job appears to be one of evaluating the news story. How often do you see one news person interviewing another reporter, for their 'expert' opinion?

A professor of journalism studies, Bob Franklin wrote: “Entertainment has superseded the provision of information; human interest has supplanted the public interest; measured judgment has succumbed to sensationalism.”

Psychologically, as a species, we fear bad things more than we like good things. There is a cognitive bias, Loss Aversion, which can be encapsulated by the expression 'losses loom larger than gains' (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). It is thought that the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.

So, when the news channels report negatively and sensationalise the stories, they are feeding our Loss Aversion bias.

Feeding feelings of negativity

Researchers constructed three different news bulletins. One consisted of negative news items, one contained only positive news items (e.g. people winning the lottery or recovering from illness), and one contained items that were emotionally neutral. When these bulletins were shown to different groups of people, those who watched the negative news bulletin all reported feeling significantly more anxious and sadder after watching this bulletin than those people who watched either the positive or neutral news bulletin.

But significantly, what was more interesting was the effect watching negative news had on peoples' worries. Participants were each asked what their main worry was at the time. They were then asked to think about that worry during a structured interview. People who had watched the negative news bulletin spent more time thinking and talking about their worry and were more negative than people in the other two groups.

In summary, those that had watched negative news were more concerned about their worries. So much so that so they perceived them as much worse than they were at the outset and much worse than they were. They literally made mountains out of molehills.

So according to psychological research, not only are negatively framed news broadcasts likely to make you sadder and more anxious, they are also likely to exacerbate your own worries and anxieties.

Here’s a plea to the media during the Covid-19 crisis:

Bombarding people with sensationalised negativity has genuine and real psychological effects.

Given this cascading effect of negativity into people’s personal lives, please, please consider such effects when preparing and scheduling programs containing emotively negative content?

Finally, here are 3 simple tips for maintaining a more balanced viewpoint during these current times:

1. Listen to news headlines, but as soon as the reporters start sensationalising, either by focussing on the most negative aspects or using dramatic language, etc. switch over or switch off.
2. Be on the lookout for the times when the headlines of what has happened (news) switches into the wild speculation of what might happen (scaremongering). Again, when you pick up on this, switch over or switch off.
3. Don’t always sit and watch the news bulletins in the same chair at the same time every day. Over time, your mind and body will start to associate sitting in that chair with a feeling of negativity. My personal preference is to watch news headlines standing up: This makes me feel more confident and in control.

Keep well and stay safe