The U.S. media is offering a different picture of Covid-19 from science journals or the international media, a study finds.

[cdemundo]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting-george-segal-astrazeneca.html

 

"The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media"

 

When interviewing doctors about the rare blood clotting disorders big name network talking heads asked (kind of self-righteously imho) "why weren't these conditions caught in clinical trials"?

Now I am just a country boy, not a nationally renowned "journalist" but I knew the answer to that question immediately.  You can't detect a one in a million event in a trial of 30,000 people.

 

It seems to me that the national news media have also gone overboard on reporting vaccine side-effects, and the rare event of a person getting COVID after being vaccinated.  It isn't the fact that they report these events, it is the breathless dramatic treatment they give these events the I object to..

 

I understand that if Joe Smith gets vaccinated and has no side effects and is protected from COVID that is not news.  But if 76 million Joe Smiths get vaccinated and almost none of them have side-effects or get COVID that should be news.

 

Right now I am watching an idiot talking head interviewing an MD who clarifies that the number of people who develop blood clots from COVID is many more than those who develop blood clots from vaccines.  The network interviewer's question?  Why aren't the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines being paused as well as J&J?

 

 

 

 

[shdmn]

They also seem to be staying quiet on the fact the US has a high rate of obesity which is contributing to their high critical illness/death rate.  I don't here anyone calling for people to lose weight and get in better shape.  I do hear lots of BS about pseudoscientific cures though, like sticking a uv tube up your sphincter or using some drugs that were never designed for that purpose.

Edited April 16, 2021 by shdmn

[Jeffr2]

Avoid the talking bubble heads on TV.  Stick with reliable outlets for your news.  Lots of medical and scientific sites out there with great information.  For MSM, The NY Times is quite good.  Especially their research reports.

[metisdead]

A post attempting to bring a QUESTIONABLE SOURCE into the discussion has been removed as well as the replies:

 

• Overall, we rate Project Veritas Right Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of misleading videos and several failed fact checks.

[faraday]

7 hours ago, cdemundo said:

It seems to me that the national news media have also gone overboard on reporting vaccine side-effects, and the rare

 

Absolutely agree.

 

I do wonder why though,  there hasn't been any attempt to control some of scaremongering media reports?

 

 

[Jeffr2]

3 minutes ago, faraday said:

 

Absolutely agree.

 

I do wonder why though,  there hasn't been any attempt to control some of scaremongering media reports?

To a certain degree, the media just reports what's happening.  Sure, they sensationalize the headings to get clicks and eyeballs.  But, the CDC did pause the J&J jab due to side effects.  Same was done by many other countries with the AZ jab.

 

Scaremongering?  Perhaps a bit.  But these jabs are out only because of emergency authorizations.  And a few are brand new technology.  Who knows about the long term effects.

 

With that being said, if we don't move forward with the jabs, we're screwed for a very long time.  Heck, even with the jabs, life will not return to "normal" for a long time.

[impulse]

9 minutes ago, Jeffr2 said:

To a certain degree, the media just reports what's happening.  Sure, they sensationalize the headings to get clicks and eyeballs.  But, the CDC did pause the J&J jab due to side effects.  Same was done by many other countries with the AZ jab.

 

Scaremongering?  Perhaps a bit.  But these jabs are out only because of emergency authorizations.  And a few are brand new technology.  Who knows about the long term effects.

 

With that being said, if we don't move forward with the jabs, we're screwed for a very long time.  Heck, even with the jabs, life will not return to "normal" for a long time.

 

You're missing the entire point of the OP. 

 

The tone of the reporting is different, and the reports coming out of the USA national media are much more negative than regional and international news outlets and scientific journals.

 

• About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

 

[Jeffr2]

8 minutes ago, impulse said:

 

You're missing the entire point of the OP. 

 

The tone of the reporting is different, and the reports coming out of the USA national media are much more negative than regional and international news outlets and scientific journals.

 

• About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

 

Not missing the point at all.  As the article states:

 

Quote

To put it another way, the stories that people choose to read skew even more negative than the stories that media organizations choose to publish. “Human beings, particularly consumers of major media, like negativity in their stories,” Sacerdote said. “We think the major media are responding to consumer demand.”

 

If you watch MSNBC, you lean liberal.  If you watch Fox, you lean conservative.  You pick what you want to hear.  You want to hear Trump get bashed, watch MSNBC.  You want to hear Biden get bashed, watch Fox or OAN.

 

Maybe if people wouldn't lean towards negative news or conspiracy theories we'd be better off?  For me?  I avoid the talking bubble heads at all costs.  And vet my sources carefully, something many don't seem to do or care about.

 

[mtls2005]

About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.

 

Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News).

 

 

 

 

Of course the base "Study" defined what is "negative" and what is "positive".  And translated foreign press coverage apparently? And comparing coverage to scientific journals seems imbecilic.

 

 

Overall the COVID-19 virus has ben a negative event. Would love to hear positive "coverage"? "Only 5,000 people died today." Is that positive or negative?

 

Health care workers efforts, vaccine development are both positive and have been covered.

 

 

 

 

[cdemundo]

 

5 hours ago, mtls2005 said:

Of course the base "Study" defined what is "negative" and what is "positive". 

 

Hardly a criticism, in order to perform a study like this of course there must be set of criteria for classifying articles as positive or negative.  How this was done is transparent and explained in the summary of the study.

 

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.dartmouth.edu/dist/4/2318/files/2021/03/Why-Is-All-Covid-News-Bad-News-3_22_21.pdf

 

From the study, the methodology explained:

“We classify all articles using two different but related methods. First, we measure the fraction of words that are negative according to established dictionaries of negative words. See Liu 2012, Tetlock 2007, Loughran and McDonald 2011 for canonical examples of this approach. The results reported here use the Hu-Liu (2004) dictionary of positive and negative words.  We compute the fraction of total words that are negative according to the dictionary”

 

“Second, we create a predicted probability that an article is negative in tone. We identify characteristics of negative and positive media reports in a set of 200 articles classified as strongly positive or negative by human readers. We use the most common phrases (typically 2-5 words in length) appearing in the training articles combined with machine learning techniques to find the phrases that best predict whether the human reader will classify an article as strongly negative.”

 

[metisdead]

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