False equivalencies abound in today’s journalism. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.
President Trump’s recent statement that the tragedy in Charlottesville, VA was due to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” has led to renewed interest in the concept of false equivalence or false balancing. False equivalence occurs when the media, following the journalistic norm of non-partisanship, give the incorrect impression that there is an equal amount of evidence supporting both sides of a controversial issue. For many years, media coverage of climate change implied that there were an equal amount of evidence supporting or questioning the claim that the Earth was getting warmer due to human activity. False balancing usually occurs with a single article, but when discussing several articles over a period of time, false equivalence is the better term.
I recently became aware of a report by Dr. Thomas Patterson, a political scientist with Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, entitled “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters.” The data come from a content analysis of all campaign items appearing between the second week of August through Election Day in five newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today) and the main nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC. They were collected by Media Tenor, a firm which specializes in such analyses. Each campaign news item was classified according to its theme and whether its depiction of the candidate was positive, negative or not clear. Here are some highlights.
First, the basics. Donald Trump received more news coverage than Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign. Whether this was an advantage is not clear, however, given the tone of the coverage.
Those who believe in the folk theory of democracy—that voters have stable policy preferences, attend to the policy statements of the candidates, and vote for the candidate whose position most closely matches their own—will be disappointed by the themes of the 2016 coverage. The candidates’ policy stands were mentioned in only 10% of the stories. As is the recent past, the most frequent theme was “horserace” coverage—that is, who’s winning, usually illustrated by poll results.
The tone of the coverage of the nominees was consistently negative, both during the general election and the entire campaign, including the primaries.
Here it is, by week, for each candidate separately.
In the critical final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s coverage became slightly more positive while Clinton’s veered in the negative direction. This was undoubtedly due to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Clinton’s emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. This is shown more clearly in this chart of Clinton’s week-by-week “scandal” coverage.
Patterson computed a theme regarding the candidates’ fitness for the office of president, which combined reports on their policy positions, personal traits, leadership skills and ethical standards. According to the media, they were equivalent.
There has been a long-term trend toward greater negativity in coverage of the presidential candidates over the past 56 years.
The negativity is not confined to political candidates. Their coverage of other recent issues has also been negative. In psychology, negativity bias refers to the fact that negative information has a greater effect on human behavior than neutral or positive information. Media coverage of public issues may be both an effect and a cause of negativity bias.
Patterson makes two important points about these results. First, the relentlessly negative tone of the coverage contributes to cynicism and apathy among the voters, which could have reduced voter turnout. Research suggests that lower voter turnout benefits Republican candidates. Secondly, he argues that the uniformly negative coverage created the false impression of equivalence between the candidates. This raises the question of how researchers can demonstrate false equivalence empirically. To what external criterion can the media coverage be compared?
In some cases, external standards are available. For example, in the case of climate change, researchers can compute the percentage of peer-reviewed scientific articles that find evidence of human influence on the climate or can survey climatologists to find out what percentage of them believe that global warming is human-caused.
Patterson is writing for an academic and/or politically engaged audience that is likely to accept his assumptions that Clinton’s email scandal was less serious that the legal and ethical problems faced by Trump, and that Clinton was better prepared to be president than Trump. Obviously, not all voters agreed. Unfortunately, he presents no objective evidence to support these implicit claims, and it’s not even clear what data he could have consulted.
While false equivalence is an important source of media bias, demonstrating its existence empirically will continue to be a challenge.
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