Yes, the news media is making the COVID-19 crisis worse

As a member of the American news media, with more than a quarter of a century of work in TV and online news, there’s one thing that is abundantly clear about how my profession has conducted itself during this COVID-19 crisis.

We made it worse. We’re still making it worse. And it sure looks like we will continue to make it worse. 

And the things we did to make it worse could be seen coming miles away, thanks to the three biggest biases the American news business has been plagued with for more than a century. 

Most media critics think the liberal bent of most newspapers, networks, and their reporter/on-air hosts is the most pervasive bias in news. But actually, the number one bias has always been the tilt toward negative and sensationalist stories. If a story has any possible negative effect or connotation, it’s extremely rare for any news media outlet to ignore that negative aspect. If a story already has frightening and detrimental aspects, the “negativity bias” will usually ensure that those factors will be accentuated and be made the lead part of that story.   

The reason this is such a strong bias is rooted in human nature. Are we more likely to buy the newspaper that reports on coming gloom and doom, or the one that says “all is well?”

That wasn’t a trick question. 

It’s not hard to see how the coronavirus story, or any pandemic plays into that negativity bias. Thus, death tolls will always get the headlines and the number of recovered patients will barely be mentioned. The worst case future scenarios will be discussed ad nauseum, but no air time or column space will be devoted to better case scenarios. The push to identify by name the villains supposedly responsible for the outbreak will be much more prominent than any singular portrayals of virus-fighting heroes. 

Perhaps the best example of how powerful the negative/scare tactic news bias truly is can be found by following the usually conservative-leaning Drudge Report online. Since its birth as a news site exposing some of the major aspects of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, Republicans and conservatives have relied on Drudge to find the stories that usually fit their worldview. 

But starting during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, the Drudge Report went all-in on posting the most sensationalist doomsday takes on the pandemic. Those takes include plenty of stories that blame President Trump for the severity of the U.S. outbreak and much more. Many conservatives have been scratching their heads about, “what’s happened to Drudge,” and some liberals are wondering if Drudge has, “finally seen the light.” 

But the simple truth is that Drudge has proven that negativity, scare tactics, etc. are much more powerful in this business than partisanship. It is a business after all. I learned this hard fact right at the beginning of my career during my “if it bleeds it leads” days in local TV news to the more recent years when I heard plenty of financial network executives reminding us that big stock market selloffs were better for ratings.

Not all of the negativity bias is a bad thing when the public first needs to be informed about dangerous situations and the suggested measures to combat them. But since fear is an emotion and emotions almost always cloud essential facts and objectivity, there’s a limited effectiveness to using fear as a primary ingredient in reporting. 

Emotions also play a role in the news media’s second most pervasive bias. That would be the geographical bias. National news stories in America aren’t just mostly covered from a uniquely New York, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C.-focused lens. The chances that stories will get covered are exponentially higher if they actually take place or affect those metropolitan areas. This problem has become worse as the percentage of all American journalists based in New York City, L.A., or Washington D.C. has jumped to its highest levels ever. 

New York just happens to be the epicenter of this crisis, with the city and its suburbs still accounting for more than 60% of all COVID-19 deaths. So there’s nothing wrong with focusing on the developments in New York before other regions. But it’s clear that the climate of fear and anxiety in New York permeates almost every report about the virus, as almost every report emanates from New York. 

This isn’t such a terrible problem when one is reporting on the medical efforts being used to treat the patients, etc. But it’s clearly problematic as the conversation shifts to reopening the U.S. economy. The NYC/DC/LA-based news media has been losing so much touch with the rest of the country for so long, it’s clear it cannot adequately empathize with it. For Americans who live in areas where social distancing is easier to achieve and the virus never really did much harm, it’s increasingly hard to hear NYC-based journalists and pundits scolding and shaming them for taking walks on beaches. Many of them are wondering why those journalists even have the time to scold Georgians and Floridians when New York’s death toll is so much higher and its own public parks have been routinely packed during the virus lockdown. 

Of course the answer is that the geographical bias is something of a two-headed monster. One one side, it pushes those journalists to demand more attention and sympathy for stories in their region. But on the other side, it comes with a hometown elitist attitude that pushes them to continue heaping scorn on outsiders even as they fare better in this pandemic. It’s a little temporary deflection to go along with their permanent elitism. 

In the end, the powerful geographic bias is choking off the better perspective we need before our leaders can decide when to reopen the economy more fully. For the tens of millions of Americans now out of work, the geographic bias pushing the doors to remain closed could turn out to be just as deadly as the virus itself. 

That brings to the last of the top three biases: the left wing/pro-Democratic Party bias. Of course, no one can be expected to be unbiased, but the overwhelming majority of America’s news media is liberal… or at least virulently anti-Republican. Denying this fact is a laughable exercise in some ways, but it’s also a little scary when people foster the illusion that they are unbiased about the political issues they cover.

So far, the left wing bias in news has ensured that President Donald Trump faces maximum pushback from a news media intent on seeing him fail. 

At first the news media pushed back on Trump’s China travel ban, and that possibly played into a downplaying of the severity of the virus threat. But once the negativity bias kicked in, coupled with the liberal bias against Trump, most of the American news media embarked on a mission to lay as much blame as possible for the medical and economic effects of the virus at the president’s feet.

None of this is to say that President Trump hasn’t made mistakes that need to be highlighted. But his mistakes are basically the only ones being covered by the strong majority of the media. That’s dangerous because it helps the people who have made potentially more lethal mistakes continue to elude needed scrutiny. That includes the popular Dr. Anthony Fauci, who publicly downplayed the severity of the virus in February, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who apparently made the fatal mistake of confining elderly New Yorkers to nursing homes.

It’s not that Fauci and Cuomo are evil people for making these errors, it’s just that the chances they and others not named “Trump” will make them again are higher when only Trump and Republicans are scrutinized for any possible mistakes. The left wing bias in American news often leads to the fact that being a liberal or a Democrat means never having to say you’re sorry. 

This result of the left wing bias would be bad enough, but it took an even more disturbing turn beginning last week. At one of the daily presidential news conferences, (which admittedly have often been too long and rambling; a not inconsequential misstep that is Trump’s responsibility), President Trump asked some of the assembled medical experts about inserting a far-UV light source down the trachea to disinfect much of the body and fight the virus. This is a process that is actually being tested at this time. 

But several members of the news media deliberately decided to leave out the context of the president’s comments, and quote him from the point where he mentioned the word “disinfectant.” Still others decided to use this quote and twist it to imply that Trump was suggesting people ingest or inject Clorox or Lyson, since they are -- after all -- disinfectants. The whole thing continues to spiral out of control to the point that Trump opponents like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are both making statements to “refute” Trump’s alleged endorsement of ingesting household cleaners. 

Even CNN anchor Christopher Cuomo, whom I thought would be the one mainstream media host not to make an issue over this “story” because his own wife has been blogging about treating coronavitus with Clorox baths, also piled on President Trump using these twisted and out-of-context quotes as a soapbox. (More on Cuomo, and an even worse example of his lack of accountability, in a moment).

There’s plenty to laugh at over this, but what’s not funny is that it follows a similar news media M.O. when it comes to deliberately misrepresenting Trump’s words and repackaging them in the most dangerous and divisive way possible. The worst example of this was most of the news media’s decision to deliberately leave out Trump’s clear condemnation of white supremacists after the Charlottesville riots and pretend that the president had called the racist marchers “very fine people.” No matter how often that lie has been debunked, even by non-conservatives, a great deal of Americans are still frightened and angered by it. The damage to the American social fabric from that particular but of misinformation cannot be measured. 

Before that, then-candidate Trump’s sarcastic and ad libbed comments about Russia and Hillary Clinton’s emails  and a leaked dossier filled with known lies were twisted into what has now been proven to be a totally unfounded Russian election collusion mania and investigation. Again, even some very liberal non-Trump supporters admit this. What damage that media-juiced hoax has done to the intelligence and diplomatic communities is also hard to measure, but it’s not good. 

We’re also dealing with a lesser media bias in favor of packaged and insincere drama, which brings us back to CNN’s Cuomo. Last week, the network produced a live video of Cuomo supposedly exiting his personal virus isolation in his home’s basement after a month. The only trouble was that it had been confirmed that Cuomo broke that supposed quarantine by traveling with his family to the construction site of a new home he is buying. It was all documented by a passing cyclist who got into a shouting match with Cuomo when the cyclist scolded the news host for breaking his very publicized quarantine. 

The incident wasn’t just an example of dishonest “reporting” that could lead many Americans to also flout quarantine orders. It was yet another example of how members of the left wing news media rarely hold themselves accountable because they rarely ever have to worry about being called out by their fellow travelers. 

There are more aspects of the media’s liberal bias that make so many news organizations bad choices to report on the virus and its impact. But shielding their favorites, over-bashing their perceived enemies, and promoting dangerous misinformation mostly for a laugh or phony TV “drama” are all bad enough.

The end result is Americans are in a pretty bad place if they’re hoping to get accurate information about what to do in the face of this virus. It seems like the safest thing to do is to consult your own physician as much as possible and take reasonable precautions. 

Meanwhile, all we can do is hope my profession somehow finds a way to straighten up and fly right. But nobody should hold their breath.