It’s a nasty, brutish, fallen world according to Australia’s news media.
“Put him away”, “Justice is a joke”, “Dash for life”, “Knives out”, “Teen crim crackdown”, “Carnage on the streets”: that’s the Melbourne hellscape painted in the all-caps, screaming, crime-obsessed front pages of the Murdoch’s struggling Herald-Sun just over the past fortnight.
It’s a long way from the sort of city most people think they’re living in, or from the low levels of violent crime demonstrated by pesky things like statistics.
Crime reporting has become the template for the catastrophising of news, generating a supply-driven “negativity inflation” where the “if it bleeds, it leads” sensibility puts violent crime, car accidents and disasters at the top of news bulletins, more often than not. As Skyhooks told us nearly half a century ago: “Horror movie, it’s the 6.30 news.”
Across its products, News Corp media has wrapped crime into its right-wing, anti-migration talking points. This month, it’s The New York Post with Sunday’s splash “Open door to evil”, following on a week of migrant-linked crime front pages including “Monster”, “Town haul” and “Open border killer”.
No wonder — when the news is so depressing — that last week’s annual Reuters Institute report on journalism found news avoidance is on the rise and trust continues to fall. And no wonder that the Herald-Sun, which has embraced the crime narrative more than most, has slumped to the lowest subscription numbers of any Sydney or Melbourne masthead.
So overheated has the all-crime-all-the-time rhetoric become that The Atlantic last week paused to ask: is the sheer weight and intensity of bad news driving the anxiety epidemic, particularly among young people?
Traditional media is urging us to look elsewhere, highlighting studies that point to the spread of smartphones and social media. Right now, popular psychology author Jonathan Haidt is doing the rounds (including here in Australia) to promote his new book The Anxious Generation, on how smartphones and the social media platforms they carry are “rewiring” the brains of Generation Z.
At the National Press Club earlier this month, News Corp’s Australian boss Michael Miller called for the tech platforms to be regulated under a “social licence” and be kicked out of the country if they breach their licence conditions.
Hang on a moment, says The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. What if it’s the bad news message, not the platform medium that’s to blame? What if it’s the never-ending “crisis” framing (now heated up to the “polycrisis” termed by economic historian Adam Tooze) that’s making people anxious?
It’s not just crime, says Thompson. It’s all news, pointing to a research paper that scanned words used in thousands of US papers since the 1850s to find negativity has gone haywire since the 1970s.
“Around 2015, the frequency of negative news coverage accelerated. By 2019 and 2020, the average sentiment of American news was more negative than ever,” Thompson says.
His comments mesh with the “vibecession” debate, largely being fought out on the platform formerly known as Twitter. It is the argument that although the US economy is doing fine, most people think it’s in a recession because of the news media’s relentlessly negative framing of even good news (an approach satirised by The New York Times pitchbot with “Here’s why that’s bad news for Biden”).
Most of the evidence in the debate tends to illustrate correlation rather than causation. One of the key correlations pointed to by Thompson is the latest World Happiness Report that shows happiness (particularly among young people) is lower in English-speaking countries, compared to the non-Anglophone world. Although Thompson doesn’t note it, these are precisely the countries like the United States, Australia and the UK where the media has been most bent out of shape by News Corp’s negativity.
Both can be true (as Haidt noted on X in response to Thompson). The platform algorithms made bad news viral by design — and news media has been adjusting its news values to cash in.
Now, the platforms have pivoted. As the Reuters report highlighted, links and shares on social media and search are no longer delivering the mass audiences that the free digital media model depends on for advertising dollars. In its most recent quarterly advice, News Corp reported that the digital audience of its non-paywalled flagship London paper, The Sun, was down by 37% on the previous year.
In its Australian tabloids, it looks like Australia’s media — led by News Corp — is doubling down in its desperate lunge for the last lingering bit of attention by painting an ever more lurid, and misleading, picture of a menacing world.
It is time to rethink the negative reporting of the past that makes things look far worse than they actually are. Let’s think instead about reporting that looks for solutions. Take the example right in front of us: with the post-#MeToo shift in reporting violence against women.
Centring women, identifying patterns, digging out social causes; the reporting is shifting a focus from the bleak fear on the tabloid front pages to a hope that journalism can help make things change, for the better.
