Got to say all of Caplan's arguments seem a bit ridiculous. To go through his enumerated list of reasons;
Endlessly complaining about alleged social problems. Poverty, the environment, racism, Covid, Ukraine, terrorism, immigration, education, drugs, Elon… Even if all of the coverage were true, the media is still - per Huemer - aggressively promoting the absurd view that life is on balance terrible and reliably getting worse.
Two problems here. Of course the news is going to have a slant towards bad news because notable events are usually bad things, though of course not always. What would Brian Caplan's news bulletins contain, reports on all the cities and countries were there were no terrorist attacks, wars didn't start and the economy was fine? That's not really news. Secondly, I don't think it's at all accurate that news promotes the view that life to terrible. While there is a slant towards 'negative' news if a viewer thinks that implies that things are in general bad and getting worse that's surely a fault of the viewer not of the coverage, because it doesn't imply that at all, it just as I say reflects the fact that newsworthy events are more likely to bad than good.
Spreading innumeracy. The media endlessly shows grotesque stories about ultra-rare problems like terrorism, plane crashes, police murdering innocents, school shootings, toddlers dying of Covid, and the like. They show almost nothing about statistically common problems like car crashes or death by old age. The media doesn’t just spread paranoia; it spreads inverted paranoia.
Again, while this is true this is simply the nature of news, not a problem specific to mainstream media. News is, by its nature, a record of events not an analysis of the general current state of affairs. Perhaps people should consume less news and more analysis, in fact they probably should, but again that's not really the fault of the organisations providing the news coverage.
Reasons 4 and 5 are basically the same thing, Caplan arguing that MSM puts everything in a negative light and places particular focus on whatever the 'current thing' is. Again I think these just complain about the nature of news, not the behaviour of MSM specifically.
Reason 2 is a bit different;
Painting government intervention as the obvious solution to social problems. Often the media openly asks loaded questions to this effect, like “Why isn’t the government doing more about this?!” with an exasperated tone. The rest of the time, they rely on heavy-handed insinuation, like “The people of Flint, Michigan feel like they’ve been forgotten.” Forgotten by who? Government Our Savior, of course. Mainstream media barely considers whether past government policies have worked, or how much they cost, or whether they have important downsides.
I mean who else is supposed to solve social problems? Clearly not 'individuals' or whatever, because manifestly absent government intervention they haven't been able to solve them, otherwise they wouldn't exist
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Notes -
Got to say all of Caplan's arguments seem a bit ridiculous. To go through his enumerated list of reasons;
Two problems here. Of course the news is going to have a slant towards bad news because notable events are usually bad things, though of course not always. What would Brian Caplan's news bulletins contain, reports on all the cities and countries were there were no terrorist attacks, wars didn't start and the economy was fine? That's not really news. Secondly, I don't think it's at all accurate that news promotes the view that life to terrible. While there is a slant towards 'negative' news if a viewer thinks that implies that things are in general bad and getting worse that's surely a fault of the viewer not of the coverage, because it doesn't imply that at all, it just as I say reflects the fact that newsworthy events are more likely to bad than good.
Again, while this is true this is simply the nature of news, not a problem specific to mainstream media. News is, by its nature, a record of events not an analysis of the general current state of affairs. Perhaps people should consume less news and more analysis, in fact they probably should, but again that's not really the fault of the organisations providing the news coverage.
Reasons 4 and 5 are basically the same thing, Caplan arguing that MSM puts everything in a negative light and places particular focus on whatever the 'current thing' is. Again I think these just complain about the nature of news, not the behaviour of MSM specifically.
Reason 2 is a bit different;
I mean who else is supposed to solve social problems? Clearly not 'individuals' or whatever, because manifestly absent government intervention they haven't been able to solve them, otherwise they wouldn't exist
Hence why Caplan says that silence is better than the news.
The problem is that he's criticising MSM specifically not just the idea of 'news' in general.
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