March 27, 2021: ... And Not As Much News is Bad News -

This is one of those charts I can look at for a long time before I get what it’s trying to tell me. Here’s a summary. 

The quadrant in the upper right has dots for all the states where vaccination rates are above average BOTH for folks over sixty-five, AND for sixteen-to-sixty-four year olds. Within this group of over-achievers, South Dakota leads the pack in terms of the former age group, and Alaska leads for the younger set.

The lower left quadrant shows the states that are below average for both segments of the population (over- and under-65).

Upper left: under-sixty-fives are vaccinated at better-than-average rates, but seniors are worse-than average.

Lower right: Opposite of upper left.

As a group, the states have vaccinated between 55% and 85% of seniors; most are between 65% and about 78% (as of March 24^th).

The range of vaccinations for under-sixty-fives is from 15% to about 37%, and most states are currently between 20% and about 27%.

The chart is from the CDC, and it appears in a column in the New York Times by Nathan Lash, a graphics reporter. (I hadn’t seen “graphics reporter” before.) The column is titled “Will We Struggle to Reach Herd Immunity?” and it talks about the disparities already leading to “vaccine oases” (where vaccination rates are high), and “vaccine deserts” (where they are low).  It goes into some of the reasons for low uptake in certain places: uneven distribution in rural areas; the much-bemoaned vaccine hesitancy amongst conservative men; inequities besetting even the vaccine-enthusiastic that long predate the pandemic (wealthy communities have more online access, more people who can navigate tricky registration systems, more people who have time and means to visit vaccination centers, etc.).

(I saw a little bit of the tech-inequity yesterday, when the Oregon Health Authority announced that they would no longer accept registration from people who listed only landlines. They will attempt to reach landline-only folks in some other way. It was disheartening. Evidently the folks with landlines were not responding to calls, having been told to watch out for scams. There weren’t a lot of them – a few hundred. Fingers crossed for them that OHA finds a workable solution. Sigh.)

Some of the inequity is funny. There is a chart showing that more seniors have been vaccinated in the Idaho county including Sun Valley (Blaine County) than there are seniors that actually live there. You don’t get a lot of charts that run off the top of 100%.  

It’s a good article, very informative, though the headline (Will We Struggle…?) may be a little negative. It’s not too alarmist, though. They didn’t title it, “Alabama Is Doomed.”  I was assessing the slant after reading David Leonhardt’s “Morning” briefing email from March 24^th, where he reflected on “bad-news bias” in our national COVID reporting.* Following are some excerpts.

From the beginning of the piece:

Is bad news the only kind?

Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS. It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what he was seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew.

When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase.  When cases were falling, the coverage instead focused on those places where cases were rising. And when vaccine research began showing positive results, the coverage downplayed it, as far as Sacerdote could tell. 

But he was not sure whether his perception was correct. To check, he began working with two other researchers, building a database of Covid coverage from every major network, CNN, Gox News, Politico, the New York times and hundreds of other sources, in the U.S. and overseas. The researchers then analyzed it with a social-science technique that classifies language as positive, neutral or negative.

The results showed that Sacerdote's instinct had been right -- and not just because the pandemic has been mostly a grim story.

There's a discussion of the many reasons why the largest US media outlets may choose to cover more negative stories than do local or international news outlets, or science journals. One theory is that negativity is what readers crave, and our national news outlets know how to read the biggest readership. Leonhardt isn’t entirely sold on this, and offers this reflection:

I have worked in media for nearly three decades, and I think you might be surprised by how little time journalists spend talking about audience size. We care about it, obviously, but most journalists I know care much more about other factors, like doing work that has an impact.

In the modern era of journalism... we tend to equate impact with asking tough questions and exposing problems. There are some good reasons for that. We are inundated by politicians, business executives, movie stars and others trying to portray themselves in the best light. Our job is to cut through the self-promotion and find the truth. If we don't tell you the bad news, you may never hear it.

Sometimes, though, our healthy skepticism can turn into reflexive cynicism, and we end up telling something less than the complete story.

*Leonhardt is reflecting on a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cooke, titled, "Why Is All Covid News  Bad News?"

It’s free, and dense, and not written by a graphics reporter, though it does have a few graphs. There’s one showing that the counties where national  media consumption is lowest were also the counties with the most school reopenings. It’s a lot of food for thought.