In 2020, along with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dramatic spike in murders in the United States. This increase in lethal violence, understandably, was covered extensively in national and local media outlets. Yet, much of this coverage lacked critical context. While the increase in murders was significant, the overall murder rate remained far below its peak in the 1980s and 90s.
This is why profit-driven news isn’t great. A headline on how murder rates have declined isn’t clickworthy.
Agree with your point about for-profit news, and I’m not going to discuss the obvious “what’s the alternative?” because I don’t have an answer other than it was previously delivered by the same corporations at an intentional loss as a more/less public service - and it’s veracity was required by law.
But the fact that good news isn’t clickworthy says more about those who consume it than the profit motivation that caters to it. When you have a society that is addicted to fear, and rage - you have regression, and authoritarian figures who seem appealing as leaders.
The alternative is well funded public news. News is click bait today because they ride or die on advertisement. If the news didn’t need to care about readership at all, then they could work on providing informative but perhaps boring content. We’ll never get that while never ending profits are the goal.
Let’s also be real here; “Murder rates regress to the mean” isn’t exactly high praise.
This is why all the old people I know are constantly afraid of “criminals” and continue to bitch about “courts just letting murderers go” and shit, because the news keeps telling them that nothing has changed since 1985. Not a single one of them ever believes me when I tell them that national violent crime rates haven’t been this low since the late 1960’s to early 1970’s.
Boomers l think we live in some hyper liberal soft on crime woke nation despite having the highest incarceration rate on earth with extremely strict penalties.
I sympathize. Some of my parent’s older friends audibly gasp when I say I’m living downtown. They pray for me, apparently (my neighborhood is so gentrified that the first floor of my building is literally a Whole Foods)
fear means engagement, engagement means profit.
The journalist name is
Judd Legum
