Q: What inspired the subject of the study?

Professor Sacerdote noticed that British media sources started reporting encouraging progress toward COVID-19 vaccine development as early as February, but American media didn’t start reporting these results until April — and when they did, they emphasized caveats to the optimistic timeline predicted by scientists. He saw that lots of the stories in major American news outlets took the tone of, “Oh, there’s no way a vaccine is going to be developed in 2020, and even if it is, distribution will be a nightmare.”

Then he noticed that, even as case counts started going down in the summer, there was still an endless stream of negative news about the pandemic. He felt like the major news media seemed to be conveying a sense of, “We’ve put our lives on hold for so long, yet nothing seems to be getting better,” even when statistics were telling a different story. He wanted to explore this feeling of getting endless negative news: Was it a real, meaningful pattern?

Q: And what did you find?

We found that the major American media are significantly more likely than major international media, scientific journals and smaller U.S. news outlets to use a negative tone in stories about the pandemic. 

I expect that for lots of people, the gut reaction to this result might be, “Well, of course the tone is going to be negative. Millions have gotten sick! Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost!” But I think it’s important to note that we’re making a relative statement. The 15 or 20 most widely read U.S. news sources are painting a significantly more negative picture than international media and less widely read American news sources.

We also plotted the level of negativity in the tone of news coverage alongside daily case counts, and we found that for the most-read American news sources, the level of negativity was pretty constantly high from March to the end of July and didn’t fluctuate when cases substantially increased or decreased. 

One thing I find particularly interesting is that we found that these news sources produced more articles on President Trump’s comments about hydroxychloroquine than on prosocial behavior or vaccine development.

Q: Why do you think American media outlets are accentuating the negative much more than their non-American peers?

We posit in the paper that the negativity could be driven by reader demand. The most-read news articles on the New York Times website, whether they’re about COVID-19 or about something else, are more likely to be negative than less well-read articles, according to our model. Of course, we don’t have enough evidence to say with certainty that there’s a causal relationship there.

Another theory we floated, but ultimately rejected, is that the tone could have something to do with the partisanship of the audience. While we did find that the New York Times was just as likely to take a negative tone as Fox News in their pandemic coverage, we’re interested in looking at how that negativity might manifest differently across outlets with strongly partisan owners.

Q: How does the tone of the news we consume influence our perceptions and opinions?

The sense I’ve gotten from participating in this research is that what people read every morning really does impact their sense of urgency in the midst of the pandemic. What news outlets put out there really does affect how people think about this public health crisis. If news outlets are choosing to emphasize negative storylines in response to reader demand, rather than in response to real scientific developments or changes in caseloads, that has implications for how we think and feel about the pandemic.

Q: What do you recommend Americans do to make sure they’re getting the full story about the pandemic?

One recommendation I have is to read more articles from scientific journals. Some of the leading journals, like The Lancet and Nature, are offering free access to scientific papers about the novel coronavirus and vaccine development. In our research, we talked about how scientific journals have functioned as a sort of secondary news source during the pandemic, and so we thought they would be an interesting point of comparison in our study. As we now know, scientific literature about the pandemic is less negative in tone than articles in major American news outlets — so if people read academic sources, they may derive more nuanced conclusions about COVID-19.

I think what’s also important — and this applies all the time, not just in a pandemic — is to read more widely and take everything you read with a grain of salt. I really like reading the New York Times, but I also find it valuable to broaden my perspective by reading stories from trusted international news sources and top scientific journals. If you’re not diversifying your news intake, it’s likely you’re not getting the full picture.