Negativity and Misinformation

There are large and growing bodies of research highlighting inaccuracies in news coverage. In this paper, we suggest that negativity biases account for a substantial portion of longstanding inaccuracies (or “misinformation”) in coverage of a broad range of social, medical, environmental, political, and economic domains. As an illustrative example, we use automated content analyses of over 20 years of television news transcripts merged with unemployment data to measure the accuracy of unemployment coverage across the six major US broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBS, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC), and then examine the degree to which variation in accuracy is associated with variation in the tendency to overweight negative information relative to positive information. Results reveal a connection between inaccuracy and negativity biases, a finding that we interpret as it relates to our understanding of misinformation in the news.