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The Media Is Biased, But Not in the Way You Think

News outlets fixate on the negative

Eric Weiner
GEN
5 min readJan 12, 2022

The critics are right. The mainstream media is biased. It is not a political bias, though, no liberal or conservative slant, but something even more insidious: a bad-news bias.

During my decades as a daily journalist, at The New York Times and NPR, I knew that reporting on happy people and places wasn’t going to advance my career. No one told me this. They didn’t need to. The bad-news bias is simply understood.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the cynical newsroom slogan. A quick scan of media sites bears this out. A ceaseless parade of disasters, human and natural, current and forecast, and all framed in the most negative light.

A case in point is a recent article that ran in Axios. (I don’t mean to pick on Axios; this happened to catch my eye.) The headline read: “Rapid nasal COVID tests feared to be returning false negatives.” That sounds bad, alarming even. But read on and you discover the basis for the story is a “small preprint study” of thirty people, four of whom received a false negative. It suddenly doesn’t sound so catastrophic. Then we learn that there is emerging evidence that “saliva swabs may be better for detecting Omicron than nasal swabs.” That sounds like, well, good news, or at least not as bad as the…

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Published in GEN

A former publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Eric Weiner
Eric Weiner

Written by Eric Weiner

Philosophical Traveler. Recovering Malcontent. Author of five books. My latest,:"BEN & ME: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life."

Responses (12)

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I agree, The News is mostly negative, which is why I limit my daily exposure. In all fairness, it’s supposed to present us with what’s new, not paint a rosy picture of the status quo. Occasionally, we’re informed of us of amazing scientific…

The mainstream media is biased

And since it's owned by corporations, we should stop believe that it can be anything but.
And we should start -all of us - becoming literate in how to consume the information that is directed at us.

I’m not talking about “feel-good” stories but, rather, something more substantive: rigorous solutions journalism.

Great points. I long for more substantive stories and not just 10 second sound bites that do nothing but cause anxiety. M