Die USA schreiben und denken ihren eigenen Untergang herbei
Für eine noch nicht peer-reviewte Studie haben Forscher etwa eine Milliarde Artikel von 13.000 Lokalzeitungen über die vergangenen 170 Jahre mit maschinellem Lernen nach positiven und negativen Begriffen untersucht. Sie wollten wissen: Wie negativ oder positiv berichten US-Lokalzeitungen über die Welt?
Es stellt sich heraus: Seit 1970 geht es in Medien rapide bergab und die Welt wird immer düsterer dargestellt – obwohl sich viele Dinge zum Besseren entwickelten.
Woran könnte das liegen?
Because the public needs to be aware of important risks in society, a certain level of general negative bias in news coverage is expected, particularly if one adheres to the view that traditional media fulfills a watchdog/surveillance function. Although this argument could explain the average level of negativity in news reporting, it does not address its increasingly downward trend. What factors could speak to it? The world of news, especially that of printed newspapers, has become increasingly competitive over the years. Therefore, it is natural to expect that to attract a larger audience, many outlets have been increasingly focusing on negative news. It is well-known that people are more responsive to negative information. Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
Hier in der Grafik zeigt die rote Linie den immer negativeren Fokus von Zeitungen in den USA:
Der US-Journalist Derek Thompson – große Empfehlung für seinen Newsletter – hat diese Studie gemeinsam mit der Inflation psychischer Erkrankungen in einem Text für den Atlantic zu einer größeren Anxiety-Hypothese zusammengefasst.
Vier Entwicklungen tragen dazu bei, dass die USA ihre gesellschaftliche Anxiety durch ihre kulturelle Soft Power in die restliche westliche Welt exportieren:
Diagnostic inflation: The U.S. psychiatric community offered an expansive definition of sickness, which carried the risk of creating a huge population of “worried well” patients who pathologized their normal feelings.
Prevalence inflation: As teens surrounded themselves with anxiety content on the internet, many vulnerable young people essentially internalized the pathologies they saw over and over and over in the media.
Negativity inflation: Meanwhile, a surge in negativity across American news media deepened the baseline feeling of world-weariness
Globalization of the American psyche: The U.S., the world’s leading cultural-export power, is broadcasting this mental-health ideology, this anxious style of self-regard, to the rest of the English-speaking world. This has happened before. But rather than spread the word through expert mental-health campaigns (as anorexia may have spread in Hong Kong in the 1990s) this “anxiety inflation” disorder is also spreading peer-to-peer and influencer-to-influencer on social media. This is why smartphone use and anxiety seem to correlate so highly in English-speaking countries, but less so in countries and areas that are not as exposed to American media.
Zum Text von Thompson: America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety