Bad News Might Be the Best News

The "Curve"
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/

Almost all news during the coronavirus pandemic has at one point or another mentioned “flattening the curve.” All this means is slowing the spread of the virus so the number of new cases each day doesn’t overload hospitals. During the “uphill” part of this curve, news headlines had a markedly pessimistic tinge. Now, as we are starting to enter the “downhill” part of the curve, perhaps they should stay that way.

We can delineate the “uphill” time period as starting March 6 – the first day that the top New York Times featured story had to do with COVID – and running until about April 7 – the first day that The Times’ top featured story projected a slowing death toll (and supposedly the start of the “downhill” part of the curve). 

After hours of scrutiny, I discovered two major characteristics of the pessimistic headlines from this time period. First, they tend to center on one or two negative words that set the tone for the article. And second, they tend to come mainly from major news outlets.

Here’s an example: The Los Angeles Times top headline on March 23 reads “'A mess in America': Why Asia now looks safer than the U.S. in the coronavirus crisis.” Note the words “mess” and
“crisis.”

LA Times Headline from March 23
Source: https://www.latimes.com/

Now take a look at The New York Times’ front cover from three days prior, which also happens to be the day New York implemented a stay-at-home order and the nightmare of quarantine started to solidify itself completely.

A featured headline is “‘At War With No Ammo’: Doctors Say Shortage of Protective Gear Is Dire.” Notice that, just like in the LA Times headline, two negative words bookend the title. “War” is the second word and “dire” the last, pushing the reader to link the COVID crisis with those all-important periods of American history: our wartimes.

New York Times Featured Articles from March 20 (Photo Taken April 13)
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2020/03/20/todays-new-york-times#thefrontpage

Each generation has had its battle: the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan… now – perhaps – it’s our turn.

(It’s also worth noting that the other three large headlines on that page use the words “torrent,” “cascade,” and “overwhelm,” presenting COVID as a sort of natural disaster not unlike Katrina.)

Putting headlines aside for a second, though, we should note that many countries have enacted wartime-like measures to combat the crisis (The U.K., Israel, and Hungary are a few examples). Our own president has called the pandemic “our big war” and himself “a wartime president.” But let’s be clear. Trump waited until very late in the game to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korea-era piece of legislation that lets the federal government take control of goods production and distribution. What’s even odder is that he’s used it a million times before. Also, martial law – although it was thrown around in the media quite a bit – was never really on the table. So while many in addition to the New York Times have framed the pandemic as a bona fide war on the invisible, there are certainly some key distinctions.

One distinction becomes apparent when we turn our attention back to headlines – specifically, headlines from a past (human) war.

During WWII, U.S. newspaper headlines looked different. A 1943 wartime study found that positive headlines (mostly about combat) dominated the newsstand. Out of over three thousand headlines taken from 1942, researchers found that optimistic headlines more than doubled pessimistic ones and more than tripled neutral ones.

So why do our crisis headlines look so different?

Well, that same study found that such rosy headlines did little to increase sales, and another study from the same year found that all those optimistic headlines were abysmal at stimulating war morale. The researchers proposed that pessimistic headlines are far more effective at spurring people into patriotic action.

Researchers' Rank of Relative Value of WWII Newspaper Headlines
Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2745651

A more modern study found that people actually prefer negative headlines, even if they say they’re partial to positive ones. And newspapers seem to know this. Data from twenty-one news outlets (admittedly, a few of them don’t deserve that title) show that average headline sentiments are overwhelmingly negative. Maybe, then, the New York Times headline insisting that “We’re Going Down, Down, Down, Down, Down” might actually help us to get spirits up, stay inside, and (just to fit in another preposition), pull us out of this nationwide disaster.

Average Headline Sentiment from Major Newspapers
Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/

Pessimistic headlines offer a covert call to action. They might stress us out, but, in possibly one of the only good lines to ever come out of Nickelodeon’s Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide, iTeacher reminds us that “a little stress is a good thing. It’s an alarm in your head reminding you to make adjustments.” When we think things are getting better, we let ourselves get lazy. We touch our face too much; we stand closer to friends; we don’t wear masks in public. But when we believe that things are getting worse, we take responsibility and make the small behavioral adjustments that could end this pandemic.

In the past two weeks, as some glint of light at the end of the tunnel has started to appear, the pessimism has faded from the front page of major outlets. That seems like a good thing, but, for our own sake, news sources should not give us the hope we so desperately desire. If we really want to get through this, we need to think we won’t.