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News Epidemic Essay

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Justin sullivan Ms. Angstadt ENGL 15S September 25 2017 The Economically Driven News Epidemic As someone who doesn’t readily consume news from any singular source and instead simply waits for information to find its way to me through the grapevine, I’ve come to realise how biased news actually is. With news sources being so divided, two people can be talking about the same thing and describe the events at hand in two completely different manners. though this should not be the case; because news organizations require viewers to get funding, and the best way to do that is through controversy, news organizations are incentivised to skew the information they put out to fit a curtain agenda even if it isn't the most accurate. This is why in today's …show more content…

A study found in Journal of Media Economics proves this by analysing the work of three news companies from 1997 to 2009 based of how negative each paper was and how well they sold. What they found was that by taking a negative view on a topic news companies would receive a significant sales boost on that paper, averaging anywhere from an increase of 5% to 12% above normal sales (Arango-Kure, Garz, Rott 221). What is truly remarkable is that the data also shows how keeping a neutral view on a topic leads to slightly less sales than if they took a positive viewpoint(Arango-Kure, et al 210), meaning covering a topic a topic while trying to preserve neutrality will lead to the least amount of sales. The fact that three separate news entities all had a similar sales boosts from producing negatively skewed pieces and news created from neutral standpoint gets the least amount sales , proves that news companies are incentivised to steer away from neutral journalism to take a negative approach. The reason for this is theorised by, Jill J. McCluskey, Johan Swinnen, and Thijs Vandemoortele in a paper that used the economic equations to find utility of both positive and negative news. After studying how hearing positive and negative news affected humans, they came to the conclusion that negative news has a higher utility, or use to the customer, than positive news (McCluskey, Swinnen, …show more content…

This causes news organizations to seem one sided and is what causes people to believe two different truths about the same situation. This is proven by a paper from The National Bureau of Economic Research. This paper focused on how news organizations swinging toward one ideology instead keeping a fair middle ground effects how they are viewed as well as profits they gain. They did this by rating news organizations and their papers based of of how biased they are. They then found regions in the united states where these news organizations marketed their articles heavily in and then used goverment poles to figure out if the region leans right or left. What they found was that news sources that lean more right focus their marketing efforts to sell their product in regions that vote republican and news sources that lean more left focus their marketing efforts to sell their product in regions that vote democratic (Gentzkow, Shapiro,et al 25-26). Their data also shows that while relatively neutral news sources had low to average demand everywhere, in republican voting regions the demand for right leaning news sources was significantly higher than that of neutral sources, and left leaning news sources had the lowest demand in these regions. (Gentzkow, Shapiro,et al 25-26). The same can be said for democratic voting regions, as they showed a

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