Chapter 1The Job to Be DoneA New Way of Comprehending NewsPick a day at random, and look at what is called news.
Say May 2, 2023.
The evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC, though now more than sixty years old, still collectively average nearly 20 million viewers a night. Though much diminished from their peak in the 1980s, that number makes them still the largest shared public square for information in the United States, happening each day at the same time.
This evening in May, the three programs offer a combined twenty-three stories. Of those, twenty sound alarms—about tragic accidents, deadly weather, the dangers of flying, health crises, and political fights. Only a single story is reported on all three networks—the Hollywood writers’ strike, which NBC warns “threatens your favorite shows.” ABC and CBS both air, high in their lineups, a sad story about a bride killed while leaving her wedding in a golf cart—they show video of the reception. Both also feature cellphone video of separate incidents of unruly passengers on airline flights. ABC features a “stabbing spree” in California unmentioned by its rivals. It is also alone in reporting on a bomb scare at Buckingham Palace, which airs fourth in the broadcast. NBC airs “apocalyptic scenes” of a traffic pileup caused by severe weather that has killed seven. ABC also airs severe midwestern storms, though neither tries to place the incidents in the context of climate change or increasingly severe weather. All three newscasts finish with a lone feel-good story, one promoting the Tony Awards, which CBS will air later that week and NBC featuring its anchor playing a guitar with rock star John Fogerty.
Of the twenty-three stories reported, most are about relatively minor events. Three stories concern longer-term trends: one is a surgeon general’s warning about loneliness, and two are based on CBS News enterprise reporting—one regarding sexual harassment of students by teachers in public schools and another about “forever chemicals” in the environment.
The front page of the next morning’s New York Times represented a different news agenda—given the medium, one far less oriented toward visuals. Only one story overlapped with the evening newscasts the night before—the writers’ strike. One fundamental similarity between the newspaper and newscast agenda stands out, however. All six of the Times’ page-one stories were about conflicts, crises, or problems, from the brutal sex trade in South Korea to the decline in U.S. factories. The closest to an exception: a story about Germany belatedly facing up to Russian spies operating inside its borders.
But almost any day would have found something similar. A vast academic literature has pointed to the prevalence of negativity and alarm in news. That literature also provides an explanation: Alarm generates attention. It is a news value, the mass communications literature explains. But a growing body of newer research suggests that it is not negativity per se that creates engagement with the news. It may be, rather, the unexpected: As the political scientists Stuart Soroka and Yanna Krupnokov have put it, “We are drawn to information that is at odds with our expectations.”
As the economic model for journalism shifts from being based on gaining people’s attention for advertising to creating value for people so that they will pay for news—from an attention economy to a value economy—the source of engagement increasingly must tilt toward usefulness.
Two generations ago the most celebrated newspaper editor in the United States, Gene Roberts of The Philadelphia Inquirer, made an observation that is even more cogent today. “Journalism is better at covering news that breaks,” he said, “than news that bends.”
Roberts’s meaning was deceptively complex. Journalists know how to cover events that have a distinct beginning, middle, and end. A president said this today. A fire broke out in a factory this morning in the southeastern part of town. Or even over the course of a longer, more complex event, such as a war, this battle happened yesterday. Reporters are familiar with the mechanics of understanding and framing that kind of news. They’re trained in the five W’s and one H—What? When? Where? Who? Why? And How?
It’s harder to cover—and journalists are generally less well-trained for—news that moves slowly, that has no clear beginning, middle, or end, that addresses larger questions, social trends, the state of a matter at a deeper level, in other words, news that bends. Are the police in our town serving the needs of the public as best they can? Is that new law passed last year doing what it is supposed to do? Is the quality of life in our town getting better or worse? Is the president or the mayor doing a good job or a bad one? And how can we tell?
In a rapidly moving information society, these questions are on everyone’s mind, but news organizations often ignore them, considering them too subjective, abstract, or otherwise hard to cover—the province of historians or university researchers. Yet they are basic questions of current public interest—of news.
Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that the press’s orientation toward covering events—news that breaks—isn’t just incomplete, it’s fundamentally inaccurate and thus undermines the journalist’s goal of getting at the truth. “The problem with journalism is that it is a highly non-random sample of the worst things that have happened in any given period,” Pinker says.
What makes this inaccuracy so damaging is its effect on how people perceive the world. He points to the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who identified that people’s sense of risk, danger, and prevalence in the world is driven by anecdotes, images, and narratives drawn from recent memory. We think the world is in worse shape and scarier than it actually is because we remember scary anecdotes we heard recently. Kahneman and Tversky call this habit of drawing on recent anecdotes to assess risk the “availability heuristic.” And what primarily feeds those recent alarming memories of the world around us? News. As Pinker puts it:
A lot of good things [in the world] are either things that don’t happen—like the country being at peace or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists, which almost by definition are not news, or [they] are things that build up incrementally, a few percentage points a year and compound, like the decline of extreme poverty. We can be unaware of—really out to lunch about—what’s happening in the world if we base our view on the news.
In one sense, Pinker’s depiction of journalism is oversimplified. News events often trigger deep public dialogues about the larger implications of social and political phenomena. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020 sparked a national reckoning over race and policing. The failure of police to act quickly during a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 sparked a national conversation about law enforcement training. An investigation by journalists of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment of women triggered more inquiries and helped inspire the hashtagMeToo movement. Beyond specific incidents such as these, journalists do far more to contextualize events in their news coverage than they did fifty years ago. Read a newspaper from the 1970s, and compare it with one today. You will be struck by the confusingly incremental and just-the-facts-ma’am nature of those earlier stories.
But Pinker is on to something important about how journalists define news, even in the twenty-first century. Far too much of it—like that of May 2, 2023—is a nonrandom selection of alarming events designed to get our attention rather than to deepen our understanding. Nor does it add much to our empathy toward our fellow citizens or prepare us to be better civic actors. Instead, as this book will show, journalism too often pulls us in other directions—exaggerating our differences, adding to polarization, reinforcing stereotypes, driving us further into silos—in short, reinforcing many of the effects that journalists claim to decry.
Some recent studies have identified another effect of consuming news. Journalism is helping to create a phenomenon called “news avoidance,” in which the kind of people most concerned with public life are finding that following the news leaves them despondent. In the 2020s, that may be an understandable reaction to material conditions; put simply, a lot of bad news has occurred with direct, negative impacts on news audiences, from the pandemic to U.S. political upheavals and economic troubles. But the despondency also springs from how news organizations cover these developments—often as institutional maneuvering beyond the audience’s control—and from the limited ways they engage audiences or encourage community collaboration or action to address them (if they do at all). This forms the first major and most fundamental recommendation about how journalists should reimagine their work for the twenty-first century.
Copyright © 2026 by Tom Rosenstiel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
