I studied journalism in college and worked briefly in field. Love it. Those are my people. I will always subscribe to a bunch of stuff and give the journalists empathy.
That being said, the three times I've been close to an event that received sustained media coverage all featured wild narrative/crusader bias that caused any reader to completely miss what really happened. In each instance, evil intentions and a dark competence were implied for circumstances that were mostly just due to complexity and incompetence.
I'm not surprised to hear that. I'd say 60 percent of the time that a news story touches on a thing that I know a lot about it gets foundational things so wrong that it completely screws up the whole narrative.
One Independence Day, on one of the many barrier islands off the coast of NC, crowds gathered on a soundside pier to watch the fireworks. It collapsed.
After helping get people out of the water, I went back to the house and caught the news coverage of the event. The reporter stated the pier had collapsed into the ocean.
On a long skinny island, ocean to sound less than a five minute walk. Land and lights visible as far as the eye could see beyond the pier. Absence of waves.
No evil intent, just no clue as to where she was or to layout of the coast of NC.
When I was in the military, I was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait as part of the early days of Operation Inherent Resolve (fight against ISIS). Some things that I was involved with or close to get reported on, and they were all factually incorrect in areas that were not classified at all. Really helped me put in perspective how much credence to give to any given article, and to cultivate a group of journalists who I could trust more than average
Amen. I used to work for the National Labor Relations Board, a tiny federal agency responsible for investigating and prosecuting violations of US civil law around unions and union organizing. Whenever I saw articles written about our work whenever a scuffle of significant importance arose (looking at you, Boeing), I could always count on the article author to get a key facts wrong, fail to contextualize the conflict in light of relevant labor law, or make claims with a level of confidence that I knew was quite undeserved. Specialty knowledge is hard, and even when journalists try their best they're doing something inherently difficult and are likely to flub up the game of telephone in some way on their way to the publish button.
People like bad news because it makes them feel superior to either the stupid/racist/woke people in the story, or superior to people unwilling to read bad news and who they imagine prefer to live in a privileged world of blissful ignorance. (She wrote superior-ly.)
I have definitely seen this dynamic where leftists say that optimism is a tool of reactionary neoliberals and pessimism is the only earnest view, while rightists say that optimism is a tool of progressivism and pessimism is the only earnest view.
This feels mostly true. Basically it seems like horseshoe policy is largely real with the far left and far right terribly pessimistic while us neolibs are pretty hopeful and optimistic in general
Don't conservatives believe that most attempts to solve social problems are hopeless and that therefore liberals are irresponsible optimists? And vice versa, don't liberals believe that "leave it to the market/reduce taxes/deregulate" requires an optimistic view as to how markets or capitalism in general works?
From a similar spring as "We can't treat the other side fairly, with liberal values of tolerance! They're waging all-out war against us!!", which you hear from all sides, even now that the argument is over who upholds liberal values of tolerance better.
That's actually exactly what Nathan Robinson says in his book Why You Should Be A Socialist. He's the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Current Affairs and a was columnist for The Guardian (until he was cancelled recently), so not exactly a fringe figure.
Huh, he apparently has a bunch of childrens book that parody popular childrens books.
"A parody of Mo Willems' bestselling "Pigeon" books. My book takes the side of the pigeon against the bus driver and encourages anti-authoritarianism."
"A parody of "The Day the Crayons Quit." The original has an anti-labor message. Mine corrects this political defect and grants the crayons their autonomy and dignity."
One thing I would recommend is, where it's still possible, to consume sources via RSS. This dynamic doesn't just select for negativity, but also for controversy – so when I read Vox via RSS, yes they publish some things I find ridiculous, but they also publish multiple sides of a lot of issues and cover a lot of things I didn't know! But whenever I get there via social media, it's either because something's hit a nerve in the woke culture war, written some scientific absurdity, or both.
Obviously RSS readers aren't numerous enough to change the dynamic – honestly we're barely enough to keep RSS reader apps in existence – but I find it's way better to see everything a publication writes than to rely on other users to filter it for you.
One of the reasons I also support Vox is exactly because they have a noticeably higher percentage of their coverage devoted to good news, or at least they sometimes highlight "everything isn't actually terrible" from time to time. Sometimes they have silly stuff, but yeah, they at least try.
the fact that Millhiser wrote the positive one is so hilarious given that every other column he writes is about how the supreme court is going to end democracy any day now
Emily Stewart, Meredith Haggerty, Rebecca Jennings -- I don't think Vox has enough rich millenial white girls who went to fancy schools in NYC and now live in Brooklyn. They should hire a few more.
Another positive one from Millhiser: "The Supreme Court hands down very good news for pretty much everyone who uses a computer" -> It even uses the words "good news" prefaced by "very"!
I first found myself agreeing with Casey Camire, but then after reading your comment I realized two things:
1.) You're right and 2.) I don't have anyone to blame but myself for my first impression being wrong.
I get 95% of my news through my RSS reader and because I subscribe to way more than I could possibly read, I prioritize my feeds into folders like "Must read", "skim headlines", "if you're bored come in here", "zzzzzzzzzzzz".
A couple years ago I re-evaluated all my feeds and shuffled them around and now I remember that Vox got moved into a lower-priority folder that doesn't get read too much whereas it used to be in a folder that I checked pretty much daily.
Because I don't see Vox stories that often anymore I find that my general impression of Vox, and the reason I originally agreed with Casey Camire, was formed years ago.
In other words my manual sorting algorithm deceived me!
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Howard mentioned below that there was this narrow 2014-2016 peak-Vox.com era. I tend to agree. I found myself reading less and less and then shifted to mostly just The Weeds and Ezra's podcast before they both left.
I do remember the article that made me delete the bookmark. It was this non-sense idea that Pete Buttigieg's short stint at McKinsey raises broader questions about his "coziness to power". Written by two authors so clearly unfamiliar with the structure of McKinsey and the consulting industry ... I just couldn't trust anything from the site anymore.
“What we know about X” is a shitty clickbait hed that illustrates Matt’s point very well. Implies something shady is going on without there being, necessarily, any shadiness.
Interesting difference in perspective there. I find Vox to be more egregious than most in this behavior. I don't think that Ian Millhiser has ever written an article about the SC that didn't describe how the conservative court was going to destroy our democracy. Even when it's a decision he likes, it's still just a matter of time before they reverse it and destroy democracy.
it's not just the selling fear, it's the selling "this is an objectively-framed 'explainer' that is just repackaged fear-the-outgroup bullshit everyone else is doing"
Vox does both - it definitely sells Fear(TM) to The Resistance. But it's also the only major news outlet that has anything like Future Perfect, that regularly writes these stories about how poor people around the world are doing better, and we have new possible cures for malaria, and the like. (Here's their current articles, which does exhibit some negativity bias, but has a lot of positive too: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect )
Vox sells clickbait. Who was that journalist who left Vox to start his own substack so he didn't have to write the negative clickbait people love anymore?
Vox used to be great about this thing in 2014-2016, articles came off as more factual and less "some experts say" opinionated column than most places online. The sad thing is that over time competitive pressures changed Vox.
Yeah, I used to love Vox even though it had an obvious progressive slant. It was still very informative. I’d love to see prestige media do more explanatory journalism. A lot of stories assume a base level of knowledge that makes it difficult for people to understand, and things you don’t understand are boring.
OK I buy this argument, although I personally hate negative spin and “here’s this horrible thing you can’t do anything about” stories. How do we make this better? Does substackification make it better or worse?
That is pretty much how I have dealt with it, by happenstance rather than by design. For the past ~5 years I have dramatically reduced my consumption of news, and that has had life-enhancing consequences. When something big happens and I have to venture back in, I’m generally appalled. Maybe it’s just impossible to consume general news now and each of us has to build our own edifice. That doesn’t seem like a positive development.
I think substackification probably makes it better for those who can afford it, but there is obviously some self-selection going on here, so this can’t be a mass media solution.
I think the other problem, to quote this Nathan Robinson piece, is that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free”; good quality journalism, such as it is, usually comes at a cost.
Yes! I do think loss of mass media is a bad thing, along with the general Bowling Alone- ification of American life, even though it seems unlikely that it can be reversed.
Agreed, I think that train left the station. I also don't believe it's a uniquely American phenomenon; I live in the UK and the extent to which the media is stratified along partisan lines is absurd. I think the same is true to some degree in Europe as well, but I’m not that familiar with media outlets there.
Because of my job I can't reduce my consumption of news, but for anyone else I would recommend podcasts and substack as an alternative to hard media consumption. They offer much more balanced, thoughtful and emotionally sane ways of thinking through the news. Of course that's not a structural solution, just an individual one (and one that only works for people with some resources), but I don't think there is a structural solution to the problem Mr. Yglesias poses.
It would be interesting to comb through people's media diets and see to what extent the negativity of hard news is balanced by the consumption of other, more happy stuff. A typical NY Times Sunday newspaper has a core of political news and world events, but most of it by weight is sports, food, fashion, travel and other fun stuff. Local tv news, still a big news source for many older people, has a core of bad news (murders, fires) surrounded by lots of happier stuff. My students get their news from social media, where again the bad stuff is surrounded by lots of fun, trivial stuff. So perhaps in all forms of news media there's an attempt to balance the bias of serious news towards the negative by surrounding it with fun, less serious stuff. Not at all a solution to the problem Mr. Yglesias poses, but does suggest the news media have evolved to address this as a consumer issue.
Also I would highly recommend Eitan Hersh's "Politics is For Power" which suggests that our consumption of all this national political news is irrelevant and even harmful to our political lives, which should be focused instead on local politics and on particular interests we have where we can be actors rather than spectators in politics. Here's an article he wrote about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/liberals-politics.html
Thanks for reminding me that I want to read that book! I have heard him on some podcasts and find his argument, as far as I can tell from brief discussions, persuasive. Politics now seems more like a spectator sport than the often boring and annoying work of getting stuff done.
I don’t usually recommend podcasts but I figure that there are enough hardcore nerds here to stick in a plug for In Our Time from BBC4. It’s incredibly good, full of interesting stuff, and fundamentally truth-seeking with an extremely friendly tone. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
I mean I agree on one hand, but on the other hand there's plenty of substacks and podcasts that are just as doom-biased. I don't think a general recommendation of "podcasts and substack" is going to be too effective if people are just going to search out the doom and gloom as Matt is saying.
I’ve actually found Twitter people that have a Substack that I like and just read them a lot now. Far more satisfying than reading the comments…at 43, I’m finding myself on SM less and less often. Too much negativity.
Also, Matt is SO ON POINT here with his COVID-19 doomer take. I just can’t with it. Some people CANNOT just take the “W”.
That’s how I have found many of my substacks! Also cosign doomer take. This space is a refuge between the incomprehensible (to me) extremes of...just about everything, it seems.
Agreed. One of the (minor) benefits of Trumpism is that you don't need to read any news at all to figure out which major US political party should get your votes, donations and volunteer time. If that changes and it becomes anything remotely like a close call, we'll notice without needing to read up on it.
For anyone over 40, gloom about the future is quite justified. Within 20 years my libido will crater. Within 20 years of that, my posture will droop and my brain will falter. Within 10 years of that, I will be dead.
I can stave off all this awfulness through diet and exercise. If I’m really determined, I might grow stronger and wiser for several more years. However, that only increases the chance I’ll be senescent long before I’m dead. It increases the chance I’ll outlive my ability to work and will be borderline poor unless I save and inherit enough not to be.
People project objectively valid individual fears onto society as a whole. As society gets older and more people are past their prime, this dynamic becomes more powerful. Young people can at least hope the future will get better as they become stronger, richer, more knowledgeable and more capable. Middle age people can tread water if they are disciplined. Old people bitch about kids these days because they themselves are withering but don’t want to stare oblivion in the face.
one’s first few years working a real job suck, especially compared to college. it het’s better. by the time your 30, you’ll have better work skills, your boss will respect you more, you’ll likely make more, and the freedom of college will be less psychologically prominent
That's a case where I believe the caution is warranted. Two trials gave mixed results - one showed no effect, the other showed a very minor effect *only upon reanalysis of the data* (the other still showed nothing). The advisory panel recommended *not* to approve it last November, so it was a bit surprising the FDA went against them. There's a larger question at stake as well, namely the amyloid hypothesis. Biogen's Aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, is good at clearing amyloid β plaques, but no one knows if that's the cause of Alzheimer's disease, and a lot of scientists have become bearish on the hypothesis. My semi-educated guess is that Aβ is involved, but its dysfunction to be addressed very early in the disease's progression, perhaps before it's even detectable.
Yes there is a question about efficacy but prescription drug approval always involves a risk/benefit calculus, and there doesn't seem to be much on the risk side here. Alzheimer's is a terminal diagnosis.
The downside, as one always needs to remind folks on left-leaning forums, is cost. It's $50k/year and we have every reason to believe the government will soon be picking up the tab for hundreds of millions for a drug that won't work.
And even if you sincerely believe we have enormous untapped borrowing capacity, we're still consuming that capacity on something that won't work instead of using that capacity on something that will help people.
Fair enough, but "This might work, but the drug company will likely charge a lot so we're going to make it illegal for you to try" is something I think I'd have a really hard time accepting if I had a serious illness.
The entire point of the drug-enforcement arm of the FDA is that desperate people with poor health get swindled out of precious cash in return for dubious remedies that might even harm their health.
The FDA overrode its usual procedures to approve this drug. To approve it, they just decided removing amyloid plaque counts as helping Alzheimer's when that isn't the research consensus and there's some evidence removing plaque can be harmful.
It's not hard to distinguish "This might work" and "most evidence produced within the clinical trial framework indicates it does not work."
If Trump were in office this would be a 5-alarm scandal and proof that POTUS was politicizing public health to win senior votes.
Whether FDA made a mistake all comes down to whether it's right that reduction of amyloid plaque is a surrogate endpoint that reasonably predicts a clinical benefit. I have no independent expertise or view on that and it doesn't seem like the guy who wrote this does either. But FDA is expert in this, and companies who are even more expert have found the evidence of that hypothesis convincing enough to bet billions of dollars on it, so I think that counts for a lot.
Whether some people think a drug will be too expensive is irrelevant to the question before the FDA, which is not supposed to skew it's interpretation of scientific data based on inherently political judgements about how much taxpayers should be willing to pay for a drug.
"...companies who are even more expert have found the evidence of that hypothesis convincing enough to bet billions of dollars on it,"
That doesn't mean the hypothesis is likely to be true, only that huge amounts of money can be made if it turns out to be true or, because there is enough plausibility to the idea, that doctors, patients and their families have enough desire for it to be true to pay richly for it until it turns out to be untrue
Mr. Lowe has, in fact, worked in drug discovery in the alzheimers space among other places-- take that for whatever it's worth. Reading through the alzheimers tag on his site is eye-opening.
Very good description. I read one of his books when someone told me it ‘holds a mirror up to society!’ Other reviews of it said the same.
Started reading it... and it’s a story of one brother who is an asexual scientist, and another brother who is a raging sex addict and later sex offender. I would hope I’m not so blind to society that I’m missing what this “mirror” was showing all around me hahahaha
That's one way of looking at it. I am 25 years past forty. And I used that time to learn ever more about the world and I will do that until the day I die. Why on earth you imagine that only the current crop of young people can become more knowledgeable and no one else can is beyond me. Did you think there was a mandated age after which you are obligated to stop learning? Or that senescence was something that started at forty or indeed any age.
It is true that young people often have very definite opinions about things they don't actually understand. But that has always been true. But here's the real startling news: the older you get the less you have to worry about. I have spent my whole professional life solving problems. Whether I like it or not solving the problem of global warming will very soon become not my problem. I don't really need to care about that anymore. There are probably tens of thousands of problems, real physical problems great and small , that need to be addressed to deal with planetary warming. But I have done my bit. Not my problem. Now it is yours.
I agree that older folks tend to react negatively to change and thus would prefer negative stories that support their view BUT lots of the negative stories that are cited and common in real life is aimed at young people. I don't see a difference in optimism/negativism among in pubs that do well among the young. Everything seems to be an existential threat these days. If you want a lot of change, you probably tend to catastrophize the current situation.
I think it is important to note that at an individual level paying more attention to bad news (to "news" because "no news is good news") and wanting to share it is was personally useful and evolutionarily adaptive. In most situations there was a clear and correct "policy conclusion to drawn from bad news -- run, get ready to fight, build up food reserves.
That is a lot less true today. Our craving for bad news like for sweet-salty-fatty foods is a holdover from a much more hostile environment.
I'm trying to imagine the editor mulling this over and deciding that this was newsworthy -- although I suspect there was precious little mulling. My guess is, as Matt says, the editor decided that this was the kind of story the readers thirst for and if he or she decided to kill it then that would be a pollyanish hiding the truth from the reading public.
Two Jews are sitting on a park bench, one of the few permitted to them in Nazi Germany. One is reading the Berliner Gemeindeblatt, the Jewish communal newspaper, the other is halfway through the virulently antisemitic Der Stürmer.
“Why on earth are you reading that Nazi rubbish?” the Gemeindeblatt reader asks. “It’s simple,” replies his friend. “When I read a Jewish newspaper I hear of our woes and terrible fate. When I read Der Stürmer I hear we control the banks, world media and international governments.”
Does Facebook harm its readers' psyches more by driving engagement with a stories of tragedy, scandal, and negativity? Or by popularizing the "influencers" who radiate upbeat, sunny positivity and make me feel fat, ugly, poor, and contemptible?
Come to think of it, I think “people like to get mad” is not quite as accurate as “people think the news is for getting mad.” Positive stories that get engagement tend to be about one individual person or animal, never a policy that worked or a broad positive trend. Stuff like Humans of New York and The Dodo gets lots of engagement! And to some degree it’s technically “news”, even if media scholars aren’t putting these sites in their datasets. I wish people liked stories about systems working as much as stories about people beating the system, but at least it’s not a case of global misanthropy.
I don't have a solution to this, but it's especially frustrating when it comes to coverage of the developing world. I'll never forget a time I was watching CNN in a doctor's waiting room (which has got to violate the Hippocratic oath) and they were reporting on a terrorist attack in Indonesia, and quoted zero Indonesians, and I wondered: did they report even ONE non-terrorist-attack-related story about the world's fourth most populous country that year? I'm inclined to doubt it; another time I was forced to watch CNN (2016, airport, flight delayed) they gave more airtime to the 100% doomed, footnote-to-a-historical-footnote Kasich presidential campaign than to any country on Earth other than the United States. The developing world only shows up on your screen when someone is blowing it up. My understanding is a lot of Africans in particular find the negativity bias in Western coverage of Africa to be fairly insulting. And this negative bias has plenty of distortionary effects: it leads people to assume people in the developing world need white saviors, and when a terrible tragedy occurs, all that negative news promotes insincere solidarity without any real appreciation of their meaning; "violence in the Middle East" is taken to be a dog-bites-man story rather than a tragedy.
Of course, economic development is basically designed to be the opposite of news. "Le bonheur n'a pas d'histoire," as they say. So it's worth saying it out loud: there are 160 million people in Bangladesh. Economic development at the rate they've been having it means millions more people getting enough to eat every day, millions more people getting reliable electricity, millions more people living to see their grandchildren grow up, millions more people rolling their eyes at boring office jobs instead of breaking their backs in grinding agricultural labor. Life is sweet and we shouldn't take these victories for granted.
There was a recent news-worthy event in my home country that garnered a fair deal of international media attention, and generally speaking the quality of coverage was so poor, lacking in context, and bereft of local sources that it made me question how much I should trust coverage of other parts of the world from these news organizations.
In one sense, there really is nothing new here. "If it bleeds, it leads" has long been a journalistic norm because even before the advent of big data and formal cognitive studies, journalists understood what kind of news captured the most eyeballs.
In another sense, your take is strangely puritanical.
Facebook algorithms and the focus on "bad news" to get more eyeballs and clicks is exploiting a well-known cognitive flaw that's wired into the human brain. Blaming "us" because this exploit works so well, particularly thanks to modern technology which increases its effectiveness, is like blaming us not only for cigarettes being addictive but blaming us for being even more addicted to the high-nicotine variants.
As big data, social media engagement algorithms, and journalism continue down this path of optimizing and maximizing engagement, they become more like drug dealers and tobacco companies as opposed to honest sources of objective information. So, I don't think the news and social media get to have it both ways - they can't be the self-appointed arbiters of facts and truth while at the same time chasing engagement by gaming flaws in human cognitive psychology.
I live in Vietnam and the headlines are noticeably more positive here, which is probably a reflection of the less competitive media landscape (not to mention doubtless self-censorship of negative stories to avoid drawing the gaze of government officials).
Current headlines: Vietnam's current coronavirus wave has peaked; Forty-two firms resume operations in coronavirus epicenter; Quang Ninh reopens tourist destinations; 55th covid patient dies in Vietnam; Vietnam strengthens local currency against the dollar; Priority clearance given for flights with covid vaccines; HCMC pins high hopes on social distancing order to control outbreak.
It's not ALL positive. But I always find it startlingly positive compared to US media sources.
(Honestly, the whole experience makes me sympathetic to an anti-freedom of speech perspective.)
I have personally been consciously checking my negative story clicking impulse much as possible. Realizing that most headlines are actually sensationalistic and alarmist. My simple tests are whether I actually believe it's true as presented, and is it really something I should worry about.
And it's had a noticeable impact on my mood as well freeing mental energy.
Also, I think framing the news dynamic as alarmist vs non-alarmist is more enlightening as to what is going on here. People are obviously wired to pay attention to threats as survival instinct. The headline, "Noises Heard Downstairs, Serial Killer Possibly Responsible say Experts" is more attention grabbing than "Cat Mucks About Late at Night Again."
I studied journalism in college and worked briefly in field. Love it. Those are my people. I will always subscribe to a bunch of stuff and give the journalists empathy.
That being said, the three times I've been close to an event that received sustained media coverage all featured wild narrative/crusader bias that caused any reader to completely miss what really happened. In each instance, evil intentions and a dark competence were implied for circumstances that were mostly just due to complexity and incompetence.
I'm not surprised to hear that. I'd say 60 percent of the time that a news story touches on a thing that I know a lot about it gets foundational things so wrong that it completely screws up the whole narrative.
One Independence Day, on one of the many barrier islands off the coast of NC, crowds gathered on a soundside pier to watch the fireworks. It collapsed.
After helping get people out of the water, I went back to the house and caught the news coverage of the event. The reporter stated the pier had collapsed into the ocean.
On a long skinny island, ocean to sound less than a five minute walk. Land and lights visible as far as the eye could see beyond the pier. Absence of waves.
No evil intent, just no clue as to where she was or to layout of the coast of NC.
When I was in the military, I was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait as part of the early days of Operation Inherent Resolve (fight against ISIS). Some things that I was involved with or close to get reported on, and they were all factually incorrect in areas that were not classified at all. Really helped me put in perspective how much credence to give to any given article, and to cultivate a group of journalists who I could trust more than average
Amen. I used to work for the National Labor Relations Board, a tiny federal agency responsible for investigating and prosecuting violations of US civil law around unions and union organizing. Whenever I saw articles written about our work whenever a scuffle of significant importance arose (looking at you, Boeing), I could always count on the article author to get a key facts wrong, fail to contextualize the conflict in light of relevant labor law, or make claims with a level of confidence that I knew was quite undeserved. Specialty knowledge is hard, and even when journalists try their best they're doing something inherently difficult and are likely to flub up the game of telephone in some way on their way to the publish button.
Psh! It’s not OURRrrrr fault! We’re the ones in here paying for the fact-based, in-depth, relatively outrage-free takes! At least that’s why I’m here.
People like bad news because it makes them feel superior to either the stupid/racist/woke people in the story, or superior to people unwilling to read bad news and who they imagine prefer to live in a privileged world of blissful ignorance. (She wrote superior-ly.)
I have definitely seen this dynamic where leftists say that optimism is a tool of reactionary neoliberals and pessimism is the only earnest view, while rightists say that optimism is a tool of progressivism and pessimism is the only earnest view.
This feels mostly true. Basically it seems like horseshoe policy is largely real with the far left and far right terribly pessimistic while us neolibs are pretty hopeful and optimistic in general
Don't conservatives believe that most attempts to solve social problems are hopeless and that therefore liberals are irresponsible optimists? And vice versa, don't liberals believe that "leave it to the market/reduce taxes/deregulate" requires an optimistic view as to how markets or capitalism in general works?
From a similar spring as "We can't treat the other side fairly, with liberal values of tolerance! They're waging all-out war against us!!", which you hear from all sides, even now that the argument is over who upholds liberal values of tolerance better.
That's actually exactly what Nathan Robinson says in his book Why You Should Be A Socialist. He's the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Current Affairs and a was columnist for The Guardian (until he was cancelled recently), so not exactly a fringe figure.
Huh, he apparently has a bunch of childrens book that parody popular childrens books.
"A parody of Mo Willems' bestselling "Pigeon" books. My book takes the side of the pigeon against the bus driver and encourages anti-authoritarianism."
"A parody of "The Day the Crayons Quit." The original has an anti-labor message. Mine corrects this political defect and grants the crayons their autonomy and dignity."
One thing I would recommend is, where it's still possible, to consume sources via RSS. This dynamic doesn't just select for negativity, but also for controversy – so when I read Vox via RSS, yes they publish some things I find ridiculous, but they also publish multiple sides of a lot of issues and cover a lot of things I didn't know! But whenever I get there via social media, it's either because something's hit a nerve in the woke culture war, written some scientific absurdity, or both.
Obviously RSS readers aren't numerous enough to change the dynamic – honestly we're barely enough to keep RSS reader apps in existence – but I find it's way better to see everything a publication writes than to rely on other users to filter it for you.
One of the reasons I also support Vox is exactly because they have a noticeably higher percentage of their coverage devoted to good news, or at least they sometimes highlight "everything isn't actually terrible" from time to time. Sometimes they have silly stuff, but yeah, they at least try.
This is interesting. I stopped checking Vox.com after Ezra and Matt left. If I could sum up their approach it's that "everything sucks".
Here's their home page right now:
Emily Stewart ... "America's cruel unemployment experiment"
Dylan Scott ... "Medicaid is a hassle for doctors. That’s hurting patients."
Sara Morrison ... "Your Echo is about to share your internet with your neighbors. Here’s how to opt out."
Andrew Prokop ... "Democrats’ doomed voting bill is too broad to pass — and not broad enough to work"
Rebecca Jennings ... "The emptiness of “couple goals” TikToks"
Alex Abad-Santos ... "The death of the girlboss" (this one leads off with ... The girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated.)
Ella Nilsen ... "Progressive groups are 'fed up' with Biden’s infrastructure playbook"
German Lopez ... "America still needs to learn from its biggest pandemic failure"
Ian Millhiser ... "There are two kinds of GOP attacks on democracy — and one is much worse"
Here's a both-sides debate article:
Dylan Scott ... "California mandated masks. Florida opened its restaurants. Did any of it matter?"
Here's the one positive one:
Ian Millhiser ... "Justice Kavanaugh hands down some surprisingly hopeful news for women’s equality"
the fact that Millhiser wrote the positive one is so hilarious given that every other column he writes is about how the supreme court is going to end democracy any day now
Imagine my surprise! It's like he and Emily Stewart are competing in an out-suckoff contest daily.
Emily Stewart, Meredith Haggerty, Rebecca Jennings -- I don't think Vox has enough rich millenial white girls who went to fancy schools in NYC and now live in Brooklyn. They should hire a few more.
Another positive one from Millhiser: "The Supreme Court hands down very good news for pretty much everyone who uses a computer" -> It even uses the words "good news" prefaced by "very"!
I first found myself agreeing with Casey Camire, but then after reading your comment I realized two things:
1.) You're right and 2.) I don't have anyone to blame but myself for my first impression being wrong.
I get 95% of my news through my RSS reader and because I subscribe to way more than I could possibly read, I prioritize my feeds into folders like "Must read", "skim headlines", "if you're bored come in here", "zzzzzzzzzzzz".
A couple years ago I re-evaluated all my feeds and shuffled them around and now I remember that Vox got moved into a lower-priority folder that doesn't get read too much whereas it used to be in a folder that I checked pretty much daily.
Because I don't see Vox stories that often anymore I find that my general impression of Vox, and the reason I originally agreed with Casey Camire, was formed years ago.
In other words my manual sorting algorithm deceived me!
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Howard mentioned below that there was this narrow 2014-2016 peak-Vox.com era. I tend to agree. I found myself reading less and less and then shifted to mostly just The Weeds and Ezra's podcast before they both left.
I do remember the article that made me delete the bookmark. It was this non-sense idea that Pete Buttigieg's short stint at McKinsey raises broader questions about his "coziness to power". Written by two authors so clearly unfamiliar with the structure of McKinsey and the consulting industry ... I just couldn't trust anything from the site anymore.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/11/21010731/what-we-know-about-pete-buttigieg-mckinsey
“What we know about X” is a shitty clickbait hed that illustrates Matt’s point very well. Implies something shady is going on without there being, necessarily, any shadiness.
Unrelated note ... the lack of punctuation consistency across headlines is maddening.
I think you mean "Punctuation across headlines can be inconsistent. That's maddening."
Vox Headline: "The World is in Decline. Just look at Headline Punctuation."
Sure.
This is telling. Even the last one has that scary "surprisingly" in there.
I had never heard of Girlboss before! Thanks for the tip!
Sadly the movement has already died. Sorry Ken.
That’s okay. I mean, I never met a Viking either, but it’s still awesome knowing they once existed.
Vox's headline: "Girlbosses going the way of Vikings says Ken in MIA"
Interesting difference in perspective there. I find Vox to be more egregious than most in this behavior. I don't think that Ian Millhiser has ever written an article about the SC that didn't describe how the conservative court was going to destroy our democracy. Even when it's a decision he likes, it's still just a matter of time before they reverse it and destroy democracy.
Completely agree. Vox sells fear.
it's not just the selling fear, it's the selling "this is an objectively-framed 'explainer' that is just repackaged fear-the-outgroup bullshit everyone else is doing"
Vox does both - it definitely sells Fear(TM) to The Resistance. But it's also the only major news outlet that has anything like Future Perfect, that regularly writes these stories about how poor people around the world are doing better, and we have new possible cures for malaria, and the like. (Here's their current articles, which does exhibit some negativity bias, but has a lot of positive too: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect )
Good point. I'll accept that and amend:
Vox sells fear*
*except future-perfect
Also The Weeds podcast is very good IMO.
Vox sells clickbait. Who was that journalist who left Vox to start his own substack so he didn't have to write the negative clickbait people love anymore?
yeah I think Vox is actually one of the worst examples of this type behavior
It's a long way from policy explainer journalism, that's for sure.
Vox used to be great about this thing in 2014-2016, articles came off as more factual and less "some experts say" opinionated column than most places online. The sad thing is that over time competitive pressures changed Vox.
Yeah, I used to love Vox even though it had an obvious progressive slant. It was still very informative. I’d love to see prestige media do more explanatory journalism. A lot of stories assume a base level of knowledge that makes it difficult for people to understand, and things you don’t understand are boring.
OK I buy this argument, although I personally hate negative spin and “here’s this horrible thing you can’t do anything about” stories. How do we make this better? Does substackification make it better or worse?
That is pretty much how I have dealt with it, by happenstance rather than by design. For the past ~5 years I have dramatically reduced my consumption of news, and that has had life-enhancing consequences. When something big happens and I have to venture back in, I’m generally appalled. Maybe it’s just impossible to consume general news now and each of us has to build our own edifice. That doesn’t seem like a positive development.
I think substackification probably makes it better for those who can afford it, but there is obviously some self-selection going on here, so this can’t be a mass media solution.
I think the other problem, to quote this Nathan Robinson piece, is that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free”; good quality journalism, such as it is, usually comes at a cost.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/
Yes! I do think loss of mass media is a bad thing, along with the general Bowling Alone- ification of American life, even though it seems unlikely that it can be reversed.
Agreed, I think that train left the station. I also don't believe it's a uniquely American phenomenon; I live in the UK and the extent to which the media is stratified along partisan lines is absurd. I think the same is true to some degree in Europe as well, but I’m not that familiar with media outlets there.
Because of my job I can't reduce my consumption of news, but for anyone else I would recommend podcasts and substack as an alternative to hard media consumption. They offer much more balanced, thoughtful and emotionally sane ways of thinking through the news. Of course that's not a structural solution, just an individual one (and one that only works for people with some resources), but I don't think there is a structural solution to the problem Mr. Yglesias poses.
It would be interesting to comb through people's media diets and see to what extent the negativity of hard news is balanced by the consumption of other, more happy stuff. A typical NY Times Sunday newspaper has a core of political news and world events, but most of it by weight is sports, food, fashion, travel and other fun stuff. Local tv news, still a big news source for many older people, has a core of bad news (murders, fires) surrounded by lots of happier stuff. My students get their news from social media, where again the bad stuff is surrounded by lots of fun, trivial stuff. So perhaps in all forms of news media there's an attempt to balance the bias of serious news towards the negative by surrounding it with fun, less serious stuff. Not at all a solution to the problem Mr. Yglesias poses, but does suggest the news media have evolved to address this as a consumer issue.
Also I would highly recommend Eitan Hersh's "Politics is For Power" which suggests that our consumption of all this national political news is irrelevant and even harmful to our political lives, which should be focused instead on local politics and on particular interests we have where we can be actors rather than spectators in politics. Here's an article he wrote about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/opinion/liberals-politics.html
Thanks for reminding me that I want to read that book! I have heard him on some podcasts and find his argument, as far as I can tell from brief discussions, persuasive. Politics now seems more like a spectator sport than the often boring and annoying work of getting stuff done.
I don’t usually recommend podcasts but I figure that there are enough hardcore nerds here to stick in a plug for In Our Time from BBC4. It’s incredibly good, full of interesting stuff, and fundamentally truth-seeking with an extremely friendly tone. Do yourself a favor and check it out.
I mean I agree on one hand, but on the other hand there's plenty of substacks and podcasts that are just as doom-biased. I don't think a general recommendation of "podcasts and substack" is going to be too effective if people are just going to search out the doom and gloom as Matt is saying.
I’ve actually found Twitter people that have a Substack that I like and just read them a lot now. Far more satisfying than reading the comments…at 43, I’m finding myself on SM less and less often. Too much negativity.
Also, Matt is SO ON POINT here with his COVID-19 doomer take. I just can’t with it. Some people CANNOT just take the “W”.
That’s how I have found many of my substacks! Also cosign doomer take. This space is a refuge between the incomprehensible (to me) extremes of...just about everything, it seems.
I like the substacks I subscribe to- much less doomerism. Matt likes to post graphs that go up and to the right. It's nice.
Agreed. One of the (minor) benefits of Trumpism is that you don't need to read any news at all to figure out which major US political party should get your votes, donations and volunteer time. If that changes and it becomes anything remotely like a close call, we'll notice without needing to read up on it.
Yea me too.
For anyone over 40, gloom about the future is quite justified. Within 20 years my libido will crater. Within 20 years of that, my posture will droop and my brain will falter. Within 10 years of that, I will be dead.
I can stave off all this awfulness through diet and exercise. If I’m really determined, I might grow stronger and wiser for several more years. However, that only increases the chance I’ll be senescent long before I’m dead. It increases the chance I’ll outlive my ability to work and will be borderline poor unless I save and inherit enough not to be.
People project objectively valid individual fears onto society as a whole. As society gets older and more people are past their prime, this dynamic becomes more powerful. Young people can at least hope the future will get better as they become stronger, richer, more knowledgeable and more capable. Middle age people can tread water if they are disciplined. Old people bitch about kids these days because they themselves are withering but don’t want to stare oblivion in the face.
I’m in my 20s. My privileged millennial peers are much more doom and gloom than my Pollyanna boomer parents and their friends.
one’s first few years working a real job suck, especially compared to college. it het’s better. by the time your 30, you’ll have better work skills, your boss will respect you more, you’ll likely make more, and the freedom of college will be less psychologically prominent
most of my friends were much happier in their mid 30s than mid 20s unless they were living with a young child. that do sucks
Well look at Mr. Optimist over here who expects to live to 90.
FDA approved the first Alzheimer's drug in years, and from a lot of the news coverage, you'd think that was a bad thing.
That's a case where I believe the caution is warranted. Two trials gave mixed results - one showed no effect, the other showed a very minor effect *only upon reanalysis of the data* (the other still showed nothing). The advisory panel recommended *not* to approve it last November, so it was a bit surprising the FDA went against them. There's a larger question at stake as well, namely the amyloid hypothesis. Biogen's Aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, is good at clearing amyloid β plaques, but no one knows if that's the cause of Alzheimer's disease, and a lot of scientists have become bearish on the hypothesis. My semi-educated guess is that Aβ is involved, but its dysfunction to be addressed very early in the disease's progression, perhaps before it's even detectable.
Yes there is a question about efficacy but prescription drug approval always involves a risk/benefit calculus, and there doesn't seem to be much on the risk side here. Alzheimer's is a terminal diagnosis.
The downside, as one always needs to remind folks on left-leaning forums, is cost. It's $50k/year and we have every reason to believe the government will soon be picking up the tab for hundreds of millions for a drug that won't work.
And even if you sincerely believe we have enormous untapped borrowing capacity, we're still consuming that capacity on something that won't work instead of using that capacity on something that will help people.
Fair enough, but "This might work, but the drug company will likely charge a lot so we're going to make it illegal for you to try" is something I think I'd have a really hard time accepting if I had a serious illness.
The entire point of the drug-enforcement arm of the FDA is that desperate people with poor health get swindled out of precious cash in return for dubious remedies that might even harm their health.
The FDA overrode its usual procedures to approve this drug. To approve it, they just decided removing amyloid plaque counts as helping Alzheimer's when that isn't the research consensus and there's some evidence removing plaque can be harmful.
It's not hard to distinguish "This might work" and "most evidence produced within the clinical trial framework indicates it does not work."
If Trump were in office this would be a 5-alarm scandal and proof that POTUS was politicizing public health to win senior votes.
That’s because it probably doesn’t work. And the FDA approved it despite multiple negative clinical trials and a recommendation to reject it.
Multiple negative trials? I hadn’t realized that.
The case for why it's a bad thing, summarized: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/the-aducanumab-approval
Whether FDA made a mistake all comes down to whether it's right that reduction of amyloid plaque is a surrogate endpoint that reasonably predicts a clinical benefit. I have no independent expertise or view on that and it doesn't seem like the guy who wrote this does either. But FDA is expert in this, and companies who are even more expert have found the evidence of that hypothesis convincing enough to bet billions of dollars on it, so I think that counts for a lot.
Whether some people think a drug will be too expensive is irrelevant to the question before the FDA, which is not supposed to skew it's interpretation of scientific data based on inherently political judgements about how much taxpayers should be willing to pay for a drug.
"...companies who are even more expert have found the evidence of that hypothesis convincing enough to bet billions of dollars on it,"
That doesn't mean the hypothesis is likely to be true, only that huge amounts of money can be made if it turns out to be true or, because there is enough plausibility to the idea, that doctors, patients and their families have enough desire for it to be true to pay richly for it until it turns out to be untrue
Yes, agree
Mr. Lowe has, in fact, worked in drug discovery in the alzheimers space among other places-- take that for whatever it's worth. Reading through the alzheimers tag on his site is eye-opening.
Derek Lowe is spot on as usual
Jesus. Did you just get back from a vacation in Siberia where you were locked in a cabin with nothing but Michel Houellebecq novels to read?
Depressing AF
Sick reference dude. I read half of one of his novels once. Seemed like less good, more nihilistic Updike.
Very good description. I read one of his books when someone told me it ‘holds a mirror up to society!’ Other reviews of it said the same.
Started reading it... and it’s a story of one brother who is an asexual scientist, and another brother who is a raging sex addict and later sex offender. I would hope I’m not so blind to society that I’m missing what this “mirror” was showing all around me hahahaha
Updike is good. Franzen is better.
David, I'm 67. I was feeling good until I read your comment. Now I'm really depressed. :(
Old people are happier than young people:
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/better-research-is-needed-to-understand-why-elders-are-happier.html
Also consider "De Senectute" by Cicero, it's all about the upside.
Feel better!
This point of view is so nihilistic and reductive. I love it.
solipsism isn’t exactly nihilism and i’m not exactly a solipsistic, i’m just stuck in my brain and body
I get you, but I would say that "we're all going to die" is pretty nihilistic, and 100% accurate. Nihilism gets a bad rap.
That's one way of looking at it. I am 25 years past forty. And I used that time to learn ever more about the world and I will do that until the day I die. Why on earth you imagine that only the current crop of young people can become more knowledgeable and no one else can is beyond me. Did you think there was a mandated age after which you are obligated to stop learning? Or that senescence was something that started at forty or indeed any age.
It is true that young people often have very definite opinions about things they don't actually understand. But that has always been true. But here's the real startling news: the older you get the less you have to worry about. I have spent my whole professional life solving problems. Whether I like it or not solving the problem of global warming will very soon become not my problem. I don't really need to care about that anymore. There are probably tens of thousands of problems, real physical problems great and small , that need to be addressed to deal with planetary warming. But I have done my bit. Not my problem. Now it is yours.
Sorry your life is bad, though.
I agree that older folks tend to react negatively to change and thus would prefer negative stories that support their view BUT lots of the negative stories that are cited and common in real life is aimed at young people. I don't see a difference in optimism/negativism among in pubs that do well among the young. Everything seems to be an existential threat these days. If you want a lot of change, you probably tend to catastrophize the current situation.
I think it is important to note that at an individual level paying more attention to bad news (to "news" because "no news is good news") and wanting to share it is was personally useful and evolutionarily adaptive. In most situations there was a clear and correct "policy conclusion to drawn from bad news -- run, get ready to fight, build up food reserves.
That is a lot less true today. Our craving for bad news like for sweet-salty-fatty foods is a holdover from a much more hostile environment.
Great post.
So today I open my Los Angeles Times and read a prominently featured story that informs me that in Napa County, an elderly woman with underlying health problems got the vaccine, but then contracted COVID and a month later died (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-07/napa-county-records-first-fully-vacinated-person-covid-death)
I'm trying to imagine the editor mulling this over and deciding that this was newsworthy -- although I suspect there was precious little mulling. My guess is, as Matt says, the editor decided that this was the kind of story the readers thirst for and if he or she decided to kill it then that would be a pollyanish hiding the truth from the reading public.
I imagine certain people absolutely crave stories like that one. The people who got vaccinated yet don’t want to give up their mask.
old joke about how bad news can cheer you up:
Two Jews are sitting on a park bench, one of the few permitted to them in Nazi Germany. One is reading the Berliner Gemeindeblatt, the Jewish communal newspaper, the other is halfway through the virulently antisemitic Der Stürmer.
“Why on earth are you reading that Nazi rubbish?” the Gemeindeblatt reader asks. “It’s simple,” replies his friend. “When I read a Jewish newspaper I hear of our woes and terrible fate. When I read Der Stürmer I hear we control the banks, world media and international governments.”
(common in many versions, this version from here: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-antisemitism-here-and-now-by-deborah-lipstadt-jeremy-corbyn-isnt-an-antisemite-but-5qpkrgvjm)
Does Facebook harm its readers' psyches more by driving engagement with a stories of tragedy, scandal, and negativity? Or by popularizing the "influencers" who radiate upbeat, sunny positivity and make me feel fat, ugly, poor, and contemptible?
Come to think of it, I think “people like to get mad” is not quite as accurate as “people think the news is for getting mad.” Positive stories that get engagement tend to be about one individual person or animal, never a policy that worked or a broad positive trend. Stuff like Humans of New York and The Dodo gets lots of engagement! And to some degree it’s technically “news”, even if media scholars aren’t putting these sites in their datasets. I wish people liked stories about systems working as much as stories about people beating the system, but at least it’s not a case of global misanthropy.
Someone else pointed out that every story in the NYTimes *other* than "news" is usually positive - cooking, style, lifestyle, sports, etc.
I don't have a solution to this, but it's especially frustrating when it comes to coverage of the developing world. I'll never forget a time I was watching CNN in a doctor's waiting room (which has got to violate the Hippocratic oath) and they were reporting on a terrorist attack in Indonesia, and quoted zero Indonesians, and I wondered: did they report even ONE non-terrorist-attack-related story about the world's fourth most populous country that year? I'm inclined to doubt it; another time I was forced to watch CNN (2016, airport, flight delayed) they gave more airtime to the 100% doomed, footnote-to-a-historical-footnote Kasich presidential campaign than to any country on Earth other than the United States. The developing world only shows up on your screen when someone is blowing it up. My understanding is a lot of Africans in particular find the negativity bias in Western coverage of Africa to be fairly insulting. And this negative bias has plenty of distortionary effects: it leads people to assume people in the developing world need white saviors, and when a terrible tragedy occurs, all that negative news promotes insincere solidarity without any real appreciation of their meaning; "violence in the Middle East" is taken to be a dog-bites-man story rather than a tragedy.
Of course, economic development is basically designed to be the opposite of news. "Le bonheur n'a pas d'histoire," as they say. So it's worth saying it out loud: there are 160 million people in Bangladesh. Economic development at the rate they've been having it means millions more people getting enough to eat every day, millions more people getting reliable electricity, millions more people living to see their grandchildren grow up, millions more people rolling their eyes at boring office jobs instead of breaking their backs in grinding agricultural labor. Life is sweet and we shouldn't take these victories for granted.
This is why Substack is my go-to source for intelligent reporting. Noah Smith's recent post on Bangladesh as the new Asia Tiger is wonderful (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/bangladesh-is-the-new-asian-tiger)
There was a recent news-worthy event in my home country that garnered a fair deal of international media attention, and generally speaking the quality of coverage was so poor, lacking in context, and bereft of local sources that it made me question how much I should trust coverage of other parts of the world from these news organizations.
In one sense, there really is nothing new here. "If it bleeds, it leads" has long been a journalistic norm because even before the advent of big data and formal cognitive studies, journalists understood what kind of news captured the most eyeballs.
In another sense, your take is strangely puritanical.
Facebook algorithms and the focus on "bad news" to get more eyeballs and clicks is exploiting a well-known cognitive flaw that's wired into the human brain. Blaming "us" because this exploit works so well, particularly thanks to modern technology which increases its effectiveness, is like blaming us not only for cigarettes being addictive but blaming us for being even more addicted to the high-nicotine variants.
As big data, social media engagement algorithms, and journalism continue down this path of optimizing and maximizing engagement, they become more like drug dealers and tobacco companies as opposed to honest sources of objective information. So, I don't think the news and social media get to have it both ways - they can't be the self-appointed arbiters of facts and truth while at the same time chasing engagement by gaming flaws in human cognitive psychology.
"Journalism is the first rough draft of history." - Phillip Graham, former publisher, Washington Post.
"All first drafts suck." - Common saying among writers.
Maybe we need more humility among among journalists, and more skepticism among consumers of news.
I live in Vietnam and the headlines are noticeably more positive here, which is probably a reflection of the less competitive media landscape (not to mention doubtless self-censorship of negative stories to avoid drawing the gaze of government officials).
Current headlines: Vietnam's current coronavirus wave has peaked; Forty-two firms resume operations in coronavirus epicenter; Quang Ninh reopens tourist destinations; 55th covid patient dies in Vietnam; Vietnam strengthens local currency against the dollar; Priority clearance given for flights with covid vaccines; HCMC pins high hopes on social distancing order to control outbreak.
It's not ALL positive. But I always find it startlingly positive compared to US media sources.
(Honestly, the whole experience makes me sympathetic to an anti-freedom of speech perspective.)
“The people get what they want and they get it good and hard,” right?
"being mad all the time is not actually satisfying or conducive to human happiness."
Amen.
So true. But unfortunately, like many other things inconducive to human happiness, it is addictive. (“I’m a rageaholic! I’m addicted to rageahol!”)
I have personally been consciously checking my negative story clicking impulse much as possible. Realizing that most headlines are actually sensationalistic and alarmist. My simple tests are whether I actually believe it's true as presented, and is it really something I should worry about.
And it's had a noticeable impact on my mood as well freeing mental energy.
Also, I think framing the news dynamic as alarmist vs non-alarmist is more enlightening as to what is going on here. People are obviously wired to pay attention to threats as survival instinct. The headline, "Noises Heard Downstairs, Serial Killer Possibly Responsible say Experts" is more attention grabbing than "Cat Mucks About Late at Night Again."