Researchers discover negative bias in pandemic reporting

Who knew?

I've been commenting on the over-the-top fear-mongering of pandemic reportage for over a year now. It is ubiquitous, relentless, and continues to this day. Check out the home page of CBC News anytime you like, and most of what you'll read is alarming speculation about what some experts think might yet be unleashed by variants, variants of concern, mutations, double mutations, and so forth. The fact that there are other experts thinking other thoughts is never hinted at.

Here is but one very minor example of media malfeasance. Every news platform in the land features the daily case count front and centre. Do any of those platforms tell you the daily test counts? No!

Why not? The government publishes this number every day, on the same government website that gives us the case numbers. Why does the media give us one of those stats with religious zeal, while totally ignoring the other one? Isn't it perfectly reasonable to expect that you'll find twice as much covid if you do twice as much testing?

Ontario first hit 35,000 tests per day early last September. By January we were averaging over 70,000 per day. During that period we saw new cases go from about 1000 per day to over 3000 per day. That was the dreaded "second wave."

Yes, Ontario had a second wave, but at least half the increase was due to nothing other than doubling the number of daily tests. Cut the second wave in half and it looks more like a ripple than a wave. But that's certainly not something the media pointed out, is it?

So yes, there's been an obvious fear-mongering spin to covid coverage overall, but it can't be real until some experts figure it out.

Here it is. Researchers at a couple of serious schools (ie not Fairfax University!) took a look at some 20,000 pandemic related news stories, and found over 90% had a negative spin. Even last summer, as case numbers were declining, negative stories were five times more frequent than positive ones. 

Unfortunately for legions of conspiracy theorists, this skewing of the pandemic narrative is not the result of secret machinations behind the curtain. It's driven by reader demand. People click on negative stories more often, and therefore the click-driven media platforms give the readers more of what they want.