Americans are losing hope for their country’s future: They see a decline from the country’s past to its present in important areas such as the economy, political polarization, income disparity, and the country’s role on the global stage. While many factors may have contributed to this dim view, new coverage in the US plays an important role.

The Bad News Bias of the US Media

For most Americans, media news is the main source of information about what is happening in the country. News coverage informs people about how things are going right now and how they may transpire in the future. Importantly, research has shown that people generally pay more attention to negative news than positive news and that they also tend to remember negative news better than positive news. Furthermore, negative news tends to have a greater influence on people’s prediction of future conditions than positive news.

Yet, negative news sells. The news coverage in the US is dominated by overwhelmingly negative information. The US media often focuses on reporting disasters, conflicts, and controversies, emphasizes negative aspects of news events, uses a negative tone when reporting the events, and downplays positive news. For example, the US media coverage of COVID-19 was significantly more negative than not only the media of other countries but also scientific journals and actual data. This “bad news bias” is particularly severe among the most popular media networks with a national audience. The impact of negative news on people’s hope for their collective future may be amplified in this context of bad news.

An Experiment

We conducted an experiment to test how negative news coverage by the US media may indeed contribute to Americans’ dim view of their country’s future.

Over 330 adults, all US citizens, participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to a positive news, negative news, or control condition. Those in the positive and negative news conditions read positive versus negative U.S. news about the same topics, including inflation, unemployment, employee wages, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, homelessness, and clean energy. The examples below are the corresponding positive and negative news passages on inflation. Participants in the control condition read a passage about machine learning that is neutral in valence.

The consumer price index fell 0.1% in December, meeting expectations, for the biggest drop since April 2020. A steep drop in gasoline was responsible for most of the monthly decline. Prices at the pump tumbled 9.4% for the month and are now down 1.5% from a year ago after surging past $5 a gallon in mid-2022.

Although Consumer Price Index decreased 0.1% in December, headline CPI rose 6.5% from a year ago, highlighting the persistent burden that the rising cost of living has placed on U.S. households. Food prices increased 0.3% in December while shelter also saw another sharp gain up 0.8% for the month and now 7.5% higher from a year ago.

After reading the news, participants answered questions about how they felt about the current conditions of the country (for example, “How satisfied are you with the way things are going in the U.S. at this time?”). They were then asked to imagine national events that might happen in the US in the near (within 1 year) and distant (in 10-15 years from now) futures. They also rated the valence of each of the events they imagined (from 1=very negative to 7=very positive).

As we expected, participants who read negative news were the least satisfied with how things were going in the country, while those who read positive news were the most satisfied. The control condition participants fell in between. More important, those reading negative news imagined more negative events to happen in the country in both near and distant futures, compared with those in the control condition and those reading positive news (see Figure 1).

These findings suggest that negative news coverage leads to dissatisfaction with the country’s current conditions. It further fosters a pessimistic outlook on the country’s future.

Take-Home Messages

When people are hopeful for their country’s future, they tend to be proactive about making positive changes in society and are willing to volunteer time and money to contribute to their communities. They also feel good about being a member of the country and show enhanced psychological well-being.

The bad news bias in the US news coverage can shatter this hope, perpetuating a dim view of the country’s future and, in turn, a sense of anomaly and despair. Government agencies and media outlets need to consider balanced news coverage about societal issues to inform people of the nation’s conditions and facilitate a hopeful outlook for the collective future.