Correct For the Media’s Negativity Bias

Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard and author, most recently, of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker

Democratic governance cannot work if no one believes it can work, and journalistic pessimism has sown fatalism and radicalism about our institutions.

Journalism has a built-in bias toward the negative, because bad things are sudden and newsworthy (a shooting rampage, a war, an epidemic), while good things are gradual and boring (a crime decline, a spreading peace, a longevity rise). The culture of journalists amplifies the negativity by dismissing positive developments as human interest fluff, corporate PR or government propaganda. This cynicism is ratified by the “radical oppositionality” of many intellectuals.

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So Ronald Reagan can quip, “some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty and poverty won,” and the left agrees. White nationalists say racial animus is inherent to a multicultural society, and Wokeniks concur. Hard libertarians argue that environmental legislation is incompatible with economic growth; no dissent from hard Greens. Cold-Warriors warn that, despite liberal institutions, the world is more dangerous than ever; so do the anti-imperialists. Small wonder that all sides have given up on the messy, incremental compromises of democracy and swung to destructive nihilism: “Smash the machine!” “Drain the swamp!”

But they’re all wrong. The data in my book show that poverty, racism, pollution and war have declined over the decades, thanks in no small part to government policies. If people were more aware that politics can work, perhaps more talented youngsters would go into it, and stakeholders would work together to forge compromises that, however imperfect, are better than endless gridlock and culture wars.

How might that come about? The remedy is not “optimism” so much as “factfulness.” Hard news divisions could look to their colleagues in sports, business and weather, and present regular statistics on the state of the nation and world, not just men biting dogs. Editors could expand fact-checking to include citation of long-term data, so that gory episodes are not mistaken for ongoing trends. Pundits could resist the temptation of the sarcastic advice from Tom Lehrer, “Always predict the worst, and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.” Because the watchword of effective democracy in the real world may be found in a reminder that Barack Obama liked to give his staff: “Better is good.”

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