When our reaction to the news is bad for other people

In "When the news is bad for you", I argued that when we get our impressions of the world from news, we overestimate the chances that an event in the news might apply to us. Our reactions to the news also profoundly influence how we act in the world at large -- how we affect other people.

Most of us take the news as the primary way we think about the world outside of our personal experience. If we accept the news at face value, our opinions and actions will be distorted. Some of what follows is widely understood, I think:

News organizations have a great deal of power. News tends to be slanted towards the views of those with the money -- owners and advertisers. Whatever groups with enough savvy and expertise orchestrate their strategies within the framework of the news. This includes politicians, businesses, nonprofits -- and terrorists.

Corporations will package many sorts of losses as a single "charge", of perhaps billions of dollars, to have one news story about a large amount rather than a series of stories about smaller amounts that are still large enough to be news.

Sophisticated terrorist organizations know that steady attacks killing ten people a day become routine and fall out of the news, whereas a single large, unexpected attack will make the news.

Compare on the one hand how we deal with grisly murders and how we deal with drunk driving deaths. One reaction to grisly murders is to urge the death penalty. Many heinous crimes are news stories, and execution of a perpetrator is also a news story. There are relatively few grisly and relatively few executions. A death penalty proponent has in a sense urged a news story as a reaction to a news story.

Deaths from drunk driving, on the other hand, are very common and usually are just local news. News reports will often note that drunk driving deaths are common, and briefly cite statistics to back up that claim, but they will spend more of their report focusing our attention on the suffering of a particular victim and family. And there will still be more stories about grisly murders than about drunk driving, even if drunk driving deaths are a hundred times more frequent.

How to prevent deaths from drunk driving is not something I feel at all knowledgeable about, but surely there are things we could consider: increasing penalties for repeat offenders, a form of ankle bracelet that alerts authorities if someone on probation gets into the driver's seat of a car, mandated living situations without cars. Just about any such measure would do far more to save lives than the death penalty. It is true that a great deal of progress has been made on this issue in the past thirty years, but the deaths from drunk driving still dwarf most other non-medical causes.

In the words of Tom Lehrer, in an early 1960s song lampooning the Boy Scouts, "Be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you". Politicians are more concerned with news stories covering the fact that they took action on an issue than the effectiveness of the action. One small instance that struck me occurred in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. There was a passage in the tax form 1040 instructions concerning certain special treatment available for families of astronauts who died. Surely compensation to survivors of seven people could have been handled far more efficiently by direct payments than by special tax legislation. Could it possibly be that the PR value of that passage in the tax code was more important to the politicians than the compensation?

The rationale for federal assistance in a disaster area is that the damage is large enough that local resources are not sufficient to provide relief. But I suspect that a more compelling motivation might be to be perceived in the news as helping with a disaster that made the news. I think I saw an implication of this in the wake of the New Orleans hurricane disaster. This was a disaster of sufficient scale that extraordinary aid was called for. Many other communities along the Gulf Coast were devastated, and the awkward question was how far away that extraordinary aid should reach. It was the same hurricane, but the flooding of New Orleans was truly extraordinary news, while devastation from hurricanes is unfortunately a relatively common occurrence.

As for the war on terror, that is a topic for a different day.

So how might things be different? I fear there is no sexy or dramatic antidote. Some of the news bias is intentional: corporations with their PR, politicians with sound bites, and terrorists with orchestrated terror. Many of us understand these manipulations and try to counter them. I think most of us could try harder, and I include myself. It is more relaxing to read or listen to the news with a sense of safety and trust than with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion.

I think it is even harder to counteract news bias when it is not intentional. When we hear of a grisly murder, especially of a child, it's hard to blame the news media for covering the story, since it really is news and does grab our interest. We appropriately feel outrage, and it's hard to be open to the possibility that there isn't anything we should do about it (even if we can). Perhaps the human cost of keeping hundreds or thousands of not-very-dangerous people locked up indefinitely is just too high. If we don't take that into account, then in an important sense what we are saying is that we place more value on avoiding the shocking news story than actually minimizing the suffering in our society -- when it includes that borne by those whose lives aren't newsworthy. We could help far more people by encouraging greater awareness of the potential for abuse within families, including the very common instance of brothers abusing sisters.


Individuals shouldn't have to make all these adjustments on their own. We should be able to find others who take the same attitude and pool our resources, and support organizations with the same view.

Progressive organizations are not the answer. Most are just as eager to manipulate us as those of the powers that be. I used to get some letters with the following basic message, but am now inundated since I am handling my parents' mail: "This particular moment is unlike all others and you simply must give us more money or uniquely terrible things will happen." They will cite any news story that supports their message, to play on our feelings. To be clear, I do think that progressive organizations are vital and I do support some of them some of the time. They are no worse than conservative organizations. It's just that they aren't a solution to the problem of news bias.

One could imagine an organization dedicated to truth, regardless of whether it supports a liberal or conservative view and how unpleasant or politically unpopular the conclusions. It could not exist for long, especially after a few reports that are politically unpopular with just about everyone.

To some extent it is professional government experts (we might call them bureaucrats) who can serve this role. They have the time to study these matters in depth and the skill and training to consider what is best for everyone, all considered. They are not (or should not be) subject to immediate political pressure. My impression is that it is the radical Republicans, starting with Reagan and dramatically extended by "W", who have convinced people not to trust the experts, if not to view them with outright derision. (Yes, experts can be biased and self-serving too.)

The judiciary can help to some extent. But I believe judges are exasperated and demoralized by mandatory sentencing guidelines that do not take into account the realities of life for ordinary citizens who are not newsworthy. The sentencing guidelines come from legislation passed in response to political pressure arising from -- news stories.

Education about news bias is an important lesson we could give to our children in how to be a responsible citizen.