The wealth of misinformation available on social media platforms makes it hard for mainstream news media to compete with smaller news reporting outlets.
Modern news media has shifted from focusing on true, accurate reporting to a focus on what is more likely to retain viewership.
Negative stories, that make viewers feel emotions of fear or anxiety, retain viewership better than those that do not. This is because the average news consumer has a "negativity bias," wherein they prefer to consume these negative stories despite mental health consequences.
Recent national events like the past few presidential elections and the COVID-19 pandemic, have led to an increase in sensationalism and misinformation in mainstream news reporting, yet also an increase in news consumption by Americans.
The overall state of modern news media has made it so that the average news consumer is more anxious and depressed than they have historically been.
Advice for future researchers:
Much of the research that this topic will require needs to be on relatively newer data, no earlier than 2016. Overall, the more time that can be dedicated to the act of researching the better because, even with the given search terms, this is still a relatively new topic to study and there is not a lot of data out on specific aspects of it. For instance, it was very difficult to find specific examples of how current news cycles, unaffected by COVID-19 paranoia, affect those who consume them psychologically in the long-term. Much of the academic world appears to still be very stuck on the pandemic and the resulting mental health troubles. Much of the research of this topic also focuses on political news, which seems to fluctuate in popularity both for news consumers and as a research topic on which to find valuable data. Therefore, future researchers will be fortunate if they are to research this topic at a time where there is as little political controversy as possible, though that seems unlikely.
Reflection on research experience:
I severely underestimated what this research topic would entail. During one of the weeks of this class we touched on the concept of being overstimulated by the amount of media there is currently out there, between social media and other avenues. I felt a similar sensation while performing my research, the sheer amount of different potential sources to sift through was overwhelming. If I could do this again, I would dedicated AT LEAST an hour a day, every single day of the quarter, to specifically just the act of researching different potential articles. The ironic part was that I did find many interesting topics to study in the research, the topic of "negativity bias" was specifically an interesting psychological aspect that I found fascinating but was unable to find much other data on it that would relate to the consumption of news. Another issue I seemed to run into often was the data on this topic only goes so deep, after reading enough sources you kind of run into the issue where everything is basically just saying the same thing but with different terminology. I think in the future however this will change as people are seeing how the modern news cycle presents issues to American mental health more and more every day.
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