Good News, Bad Placement
Last week I wondered which way the media narrative was going to head, when I saw – in the same day or two mind you – the New Republic note that things in Iraq were possibly turning around, that they weren't "unrelentingly ghastly" right before I saw another story saying that 2007 had become the deadliest year for American forces in Iraq.
Given the fact that it contained a hard statistic, the bad news story seemed to grab more attention – at least according to this writer's observations. The 'Progress in Iraq' story is far murkier and relies on some observational evidence and an anecdote here or there, so I wasn't all that surprised.
Former USA Today writer Richard Benedetto did a similar – definitely more concrete – exercise when he came across another story a little while ago, the story that September 2007 had seen the fewest deaths in Iraq since March of 2006.
He shared his observations in The Politico:
None of the top newspapers played it on their Oct. 31 front page, the day after the reports were released.He then compared it to the coverage given the same statistic early this year, when April showed the highest death toll of the year. He found that stat made front page news on the Washington Post and "many other newspapers" – and that September's lowest month tally was consigned to page A14. So the fact that April was the deadliest of 4 months this year was, on the surface, more newsworthy than September being the least deadly month in about a year and a half.Many, including The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, played it well inside the paper. But some, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, didn't mention it at all, instead trumpeting bad news from Iraq.
Benedetto then asked his Politics of Mass Communications what they made of the discrepancy:
Most of my students, many of whom are war opponents, still came down on the side of playing the report on Page 1.Lobbing out the possibility of 'anti-war bias' is more than understandable, given the circumstances. But I think there is also something to bias that journalists show towards bad news. News merit nearly always ends up skewing towards the aberration from the norm, meaning covering bad news more than good news. As the old journalistic adage goes, "If 1,000 planes take off and land, there's no news; if 1,000 planes take off and 1 crashes, you cover the crash.""If you are going to put stories on Page 1 when the U.S. death toll goes up, it is only fair to put them on Page 1 when the deaths go down," one student said.
I then asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers. While some students said yes, especially the conservatives, most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous.
But what happens when the bad news is the norm, as seems to be the case with news from Iraq. Then isn't the good news the aberration worth reporting?