Negativity Bias and the Media Landscape Exploiting It
Negativity bias is a real thing and it doesn't help we're inundated with a media landscape profiting from exploiting it.
Unless we’re in the media or politics business, politics is usually a subject we avoid in certain company (or at least we’re told we should). After all, starting a dialog with, “How about that Joe Biden, huh?” is a great way to find out your Uncle Ralph who’s been like a father to you your whole life binges on right-wing hate media and believes every conspiracy theory he reads on the internet.
Since 2016, this restraint has abated somewhat, in part because Uncle Ralph finally felt free to let his inner angry troll the rules of common decency previously kept at bay emerge from under the bridge.
Perhaps because of the onslaught of bleak, cortisol-inducing doom and gloom we were perpetually confronted with between the years 2017–2021, or in spite of it, one thing you may have noticed is the tendency toward pessimism, even when confronted with optimistic information.
For example, this summer, a CNN poll reported 51% of respondents felt the economy was getting worse despite obvious economic news to the contrary. Whatever your feelings about polls, that’s a pretty alarming finding. A month later, 58% said Biden’s policies have made economic conditions worse despite the economy being the strongest it’s been in decades. According to a Harris poll, many Americans this fall were unaware of upward economic growth or just simply didn’t believe the positive economic news coming out of the White House. Two-thirds (68%; republicans: 69%, Democrats: 68%) of the poll’s respondents reported difficulty feeling happy about positive economic news when each month they feel financially strained. Two-thirds (65%) believe the economy is worse than the media reports. 51% believe (incorrectly) unemployment is nearing a 50-year high.
It’s ironic CNN reported that, because it is one of the worst offenders when it comes to ignoring most upward economic and social trends. The billionaire-funded corporate media — of which CNN is a member — is generally uninterested in reporting positive economic news from Democratic administrations. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as the saying goes. Collapsing on their fainting couches over “Biden’s age” garners more people’s clicks and eyeballs (i.e., ratings).
But has it always been this way? Are we hardwired for “negativity bias”?
According to Kendra Cherry, MSEd:
Negativity bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we feel the joy of praise.
After the Obama administration salvaged the economy following the crash the Bush administration initiated with tax cuts to the morbidly rich and charging two illegal wars to the nation’s credit card, there were still people walking around convinced for eight years of Obama’s presidency the economy was in a shambles.
To be fair, the recovery after 2008 wasn’t perfect; it still left too many behind. There were and are sectors of our society perpetually underfunded, undervalued, and marginalized. But Obama left office with a thriving economy over all.
It also didn’t help that the right-wing hate machine and the republican party for which it speaks were working overtime to undervalue, underestimate, and marginalize the first African American president, exploiting people’s negativity — and confirmation — bias.
According to Kendra Cherry, “We tend to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones, learn more from negative outcomes and experiences, make decisions based on negative information more than positive data.“
Dr. Jim Taylor, PhD., however, urges us to “accept, not resist” our negativity.
In a Psychology Today piece published last spring, Dr. Taylor states:
Negativity keeps your expectations low, which reduces the pressure you put on yourself. It also protects you from the pain of failure if you do give it your all and you don’t achieve your goals; you have an excuse for your failure. In other words, by being negative, if you end up performing poorly (at work or in school, or in some other setting), you won’t be that disappointed because you will have expected it. And if you actually exceed your self-imposed low expectations, then it feels like a bigger victory than it might actually be (and a big relief that you didn’t fail).
If your negativity isn’t grounded in reality, then you can challenge it. Tell yourself that it’s not true and why it’s not true. By actively challenging your negativity, it will affect you less because negativity is like a bully; if you stand up to it, it will back down. With practice at replacing your negativity with positive alternatives, you take away the power of the negativity until it no longer has a hold on you.
When it comes to politics, we are bombarded daily with snippets of reality, not the whole picture. If the corporate media’s bias is to ratings, what it is telling us is skewed toward the interests of the corporations that control the flow of information.
For example, when was the last time we saw a story, even on the “liberal” CNN or MSNBC, on the labor movement? While we may be able to find some about it online, on prime time television, not so much.
What is never reported is the fact that the republican assault on unionization got a major gift in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who took a meat axe to unions, effectively cutting off access to the middle class Americans had enjoyed for fifty years.
What is never reported is the fact that in 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the unionization rate was 20.1 percent with 17.7 million union workers. One year ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported union membership in the United States in 2021 to be at 10.3 percent while the number of unionized workers continued its decline to 14 million.
Policies to outsource what were once well-paying union jobs to low-wage countries ensued over the next decade.
But do you think we’re hearing on the news any deep analysis over why the American middle class has shrunk?
Nope.
Is there anyone out there aside from progressive podcasters calling “inflation” what it actually is — corporate greed?
Nope.
Instead, we get “Thanks to Biden, You Are Getting an Incredible Shrinking Paycheck”, and “Biden’s Energy Policy Is Tailor-Made to Crush the Middle Class”.
When was the last time we heard a for-profit media anchor utter the phrase “climate change”? There’s plenty of disaster porn over worsening weather. None if it in the corporate media is accompanied with those two dirty words the CEOs of fossil fuel polluters sitting on the media companies’ boards of directors want any of us talking about.
When we the last time the media reported on the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” Trump signed into law in 2017, handing $1.5 trillion in permanent tax cuts to wealthy tax cheats and corporations?
That might have something to do with why we’re expected to keep forking over more.
Speaking of tax cheats, when was the last time we heard about how much they, not “poor people on welfare,” are ripping us off?
Instead, out of fear of being called “liberal,” news anchors sit there and allow lawmakers to promulgate lies about “open borders” without seizing the opportunity to point out that not only is our border — always the southern one, never the one with Canada—”open”; that lie gets amplified across social media and the internet in Mexico and Central America, leading to unassuming asylum seekers and those just taking advantage of our “free-trade” looking for work to believe Democratic administrations have “opened” the border to them when they haven’t.
Crime is not “running rampant” in “Democrat-run cities”; the gap between the poor and obscenely wealthy has widened, leading to states with less access to social safety nets, as republican-led municipalities are guilty of perpetrating, to leave more people prey to diseases of despair, like drug addiction and alcoholism.
It isn’t just “mental health” making us the global leader in gun deaths; it’s mentally ill people having nearly unfettered access to mass kill machines compliments of a gun lobby, lawmakers, and the corporate media failing to address what the sacrosanct Second Amendment actually says about a “well-regulated militia”.
So, how do we push back against an embarrassing media infrastructure exploiting our negativity biases?
Unfortunately, it’s up to us.
Dr. Jim Taylor suggests we know what’s true and what isn’t so we are able to push back against the negativity potentially crippling us.
First, if you find yourself succumbing to despair, anger, and/or frustration over a news headline, read more about it. “Google it.” See what else is out there that provides more perspective. You will find, even if bad news, the increase in information should give you the empowerment you need to pull yourself out of the funk.
For example, I find the topic of climate change depressing. I think a great deal about how we have destroyed the planet so irreversibly, we’re basically screwed.
Yet, that concern has prompted me to write pieces that highlight both the exigencies of the climate emergency in addition hopeful steps we are taking to mitigate it, like “Biden Further Channels His Inner FDR With the American Climate Corps,” and “The Hottest Day in History Reminds Us Despair Is Not An Option”.
Second, fact-check, fact-check, fact-check. Just because our confirmation (and maybe negativity) bias tells us we should believe something because it conforms to our worldview, hop online and check out any of the myriad fact-checking sites assiduously unpacking the most trending headlines. “Googling” something is okay, but internet algorithms are designed to force us into filter bubbles. In that case, check out a search engine that doesn’t track, like DuckDuckGo or Brave.
Third, get involved. Whether you’re passionate about the environment, reproductive rights, voting rights, or gun rights, there are activist groups out there in your area seeking members. Most are free and are replete with tasks one can launch into without experience. All that’s needed is a desire to make things better. Change always happens from the bottom up.
Negativity bias is a real thing and it doesn’t help we’re inundated with a media landscape profiting from exploiting it. While we can’t do anything about that, there are steps we can take to put the vitriol our negativity might produce to positive use.