The System that Fuels Media Negativity – Transcript

00:00the end might not be meaner Doom might not be inevitable but not according to the news after a weekend of dramatic White House emergency actions U.S President Joe Biden has given the go ahead for a controversial oil drilling scheme environmentally say it's a carbon bomb and despite a wet winter in the west persistent drought and over development

00:26caused record low water levels for tens of millions of Americans and a warning this is going to be part of the Fallout from the dramatic roiling controversy sort of culture War type disinformation Witch Hunt those were lies uh not language you use if you are hoping for a diplomatic outcome imagine a forest imagine it's your home it's both your shelter and your source

00:52of sustenance it offers rocks to make axes Timber to build shelters but most importantly berries and nuts and ducks and all sorts of food but to get to it you have to go out out is scary out is where the threats are you're on a path your sight lines are limited this forces you to walk to search as a necessity for survival to find the food that will feed you your mate or your child that will

01:20ensure a slightly altered copy of your DNA gets copied once again to keep the species Alive You Need To Tread into the unknown so you walk and you search and you walk and you search and you walk and you search and you walk and you bear there's a bear epinephrine cortisol your heart rate spikes breathing quickens blood vessels contract digestion stops your vision focuses your pupils dilate your hearing drops out your muscles

01:46tense and within an instant your body has reworked itself re-prioritize resources switching from a physiological State suited to exploring to one that can best assess a dress or evade a threat this split-second moment of identifying a threat has occurred immeasurable times through human history ending in immeasurable different outcomes but each of these outcomes can be categorized into one of two categories survival or death extraneous factors altered each a slippery rock

02:14slow to retreat a convenient cave offered Refuge a blunt spear inhibited a defense but when summing up the total of those immeasurable instances there was a pattern the degree of that physiological response correlated to the likelihood of survival how well muscles tense how much Vision focused how quickly cortisol released all this mattered to whether or not a human survived an encounter with a threat so through the totality of

02:40humanity the DNA that created humans with a stronger response to the negative was more likely to get recreated through Offspring that's Evolution but that's also a theory but we do know with certainty is that today's humans respond more strongly to a negative stimulus than a positive one even when those two stimuli are objectively equal in weight think back to high school what do you remember the great jokes you told or all the awkward Encounters this

03:08disproportionate response is something that we can and have proved time and time again in academic research so we call it the negativity bias but what we can't directly prove is whether or not this is something natural something rooted in our DNA crafted by Evolution or if it's cultural maybe Society over emphasizes negative moments maybe the awkward encounters for Middle School really did have more of an impact on others perception of us than the great jokes and so we've learned to react to

03:35them appropriately but evolution leaves its fingerprints and natural experiments can search for them certain humans are male certain others are female and the most critical component of evolution is reproduction during human pregnancy The evolutionary influence of Parental death differs depending on whether it occurs to a father or mother if a father dies the likelihood of reproductive success does go down there's then only one

04:01individual in a diminished physical state to find food and fight off threats but there's still a chance if the mother dies however that's it reproduction fails Evolution stops but simultaneously in an era when pregnancy was far more perilous than today reproductive success went up when food was more plentiful therefore the chance of a father's DNA getting passed on increased as they found more food but to do so they

04:28couldn't be too worried about the negative the threats they needed to be motivated to take the level of risk that optimizes for finding the most food possible even if it increases their chances of death meanwhile the mother with far higher and more direct evolutionary pressure to survive must first and foremost focus on her and her child's survival her fight or flight response needs to be huge so she's able to best respond to any threat that she

04:53might encounter when studied the facts support this Theory male humans exhibit a weaker negativity bias than female ones they still have the bias they still respond disproportionately to the negative but not quite as strongly it seems like Evolution worked crafting a structure that appropriately optimized for the greatest likelihood of successful reproduction so the case is made as best we can tell the negativity

05:19bias was not learned it was evolved it's natural the positive just doesn't elicit the same emotional response in humans and there's not a whole lot we can do about it because it is literally rooted in our DNA that developed before farming and restaurants and electricity and supermarkets and telephones and TV and the internet and the information overload that inundated us far faster than Evolution could possibly respond we are dumb monkeys using our dumb monkey

05:45brains to trick other dumb monkeys into giving other dumb monkeys attention and there's nothing we can do about it so we react more quickly and with more Force to the negative it follows then that our eyes are naturally drawn first towards the day's bad news but the trend towards the negative starts even before you the consumer it begins with a journalist subject to the same natural negativity bias it's more likely that what a journalist ends up pitching to their

06:12editor takes on a negative slant subconsciously it just feels more important to cover more exciting to follow and Carries more potential to Captivate an audience this negative lean of course goes up the line influencing the editor that then green lines the story the news institution that publishes the story and the award juries that recognize exceptional work next the negativity bias gets rewarded by the public IT supplies and demands receiving clicks views engagement outrage and

06:39attention from people who can't help but react to the bad news it's all pretty intuitive bad news proliferates because it's biologically what reporters are drawn to report on and consumers are drawn to consume but none of this explains why some countries media is more negative than others that has less to do with human nature and more with how a society goes about making news among journalists there's surprisingly little consensus as to what exactly is

07:06defined as news sure there's a dictionary definition but it's so broad that it might be easier to identify what news isn't than is a functional definition on the other hand has proved hard to come by and harder to agree on to some journalists news is news when it fits into one or more of these particular identifiable bins for others the list slightly differs for others still the notion of even trying to qualify what actually counts as news is

07:33too much to ask you know it when you see it it simply is zoom out further and questions become more vexing what is News 4 is it entertainment or a public service whose role is it to produce and provide the news the state or independent organizations who does the new serve stakeholders shareholders the states the public but while these questions might keep academics up at night media institutions answer them every moment of

08:00every day with every piece they publish offering through example after example of exactly what that particular society has decided to Define as news and the purpose of news for decades critical onlookers have scanned America's pro-private hyper-competitive for-profit media landscape and have drawn two broad conclusions it tends to be more negative than most and it's getting more negative what's been more difficult though was

08:26proving to what extent if any U.S media skewed more negatively than other nations with different events impacting different countries after all and with different cultural assumptions as to what different events mean it's nearly impossible drawing a clean comparison between any two Nations Media maybe in a bigger country there's just too much bad happening to leave airtime for the good well that was until one story came to impact every single media Market on the

08:52planet at the exact same time really like no other phenomena before it the covid-19 pandemic and its near Universal weight offered the rarest of opportunities to compare media tone across countries some identify the chance and in early 2021 this paper analyzing and comparing English language stories approach to reporting on the pandemic went public collecting some twenty thousand covert articles from these sources in the US and these sources abroad the researchers traced

09:20the prevalence of negative words and terms to predict the negative slant of each the results were staggering this is the negativity Trend in international sources across much of 2020 hovering steadily around 50 percent then this is the U.S media whose covid-19 coverage leans negative at a whopping 87 percent across the study and this vast Gulf between just how bad the news is in the U.S versus the rest of the world is only

09:46exacerbated by these additional findings that the nation's most popular news sources Trend even more negative than average performers clearly the negativity bias is working fueling a vicious cycle that will only lead to more and more and more of it and this all feels like a problem but maybe it's not maybe it's just a thing after all this is natural maybe negativity is just how we communicate

10:12maybe it's even a good thing we talk about our issues meaning we find ways to address them or maybe it can be both a simultaneous source and stymie of progress consider it theoretically say negative news gets just 10 percent more attention first one must consider that it's an arms race there are only so many eyeballs so when the success metric is eyeballs in a competitive news industry any Edge be it little will get captured

10:39so a 10 attention Edge will lead to 20 or 30 or 40 percent more negative news because if everyone else is doing it then everybody has to do it it's an exponential effect next say there are two stories but there's only time for one the first is on a brand new vaccine a miracle cure something that will improve one's odds of Survival by 50 the second is on a crime wave a shooting spree something that'll decrease the

11:06odds of Survival by five percent in this theoretical environment that Second Story wins it's scarier it's more dramatic it's going to keep the eyeballs from switching to that other channel this will kill people the crime wave might stop the attention might lead to intervention but all the while more people are dying of a preventable Disease an epidemic that could have been stopped if only people had heard of that

11:30new miracle cure in our heads problems feel far more significant than potential we'd much rather solve a problem than capture potential early in the covet pandemic there was no news but coven news but not all was negative there were times when things got better for every upslope there was a downslope but you could hardly tell based on the news Research into the matter found that the degree of negativity of coven news had

11:56little in fact sometimes inverse correlation with the covid case count at the given moment this meant that while a news consumer might have theoretically known that things were comparatively better or worse it didn't necessarily feel that way since the tone of the media inputs stayed consistently dire this did have an impact now with retrospect we understand the cost of covid precautions precautions got in the way of precautions the Persistence of

12:23mask mandates and school closures and Border restrictions led to a change in calculus of when they should have been implemented in the Public's minds think of it like this if a town will have only tolerated 12 months of mass mandates over 36 months of the pandemic they probably should have been applied here as hospitalizations and deaths were Rising most quickly but rather on average they were applied here at the start just stretching until tolerance waned meaning a limited supply of precaution was wasted on times when

12:50cases were naturally waning of course this sort of rationality can only be applied in retrospect but it demonstrates the impact we were incapable of properly assessing risk perhaps in part because our information inputs didn't modulate tone in step with the risk things always felt at their worst so it never felt like the moment for a reprieve take another dramatically different example research has demonstrated that U.S presidents in elections for a second term are