Episode 69 - TV Journalists & Progress in America

Sep 15

Riots are overtaking the streets, murderers are running unchecked, and gunshots are as common as fireworks...if you believe the evening news. So statistically, how bad is America, really?

There are online lists for all the credible news journalists who have lied about one very shocking, specific type of event. Violence. For some reason, journalists just can’t stop getting caught lying about violent events. Brian Williams lied about being shot down in Iraq. Mike Tobin lied about being punched during a union rally. And so, so many journalists have straight-up fabricated Benghazi stories. Why? Why is violence the go-to news lie, when there’s already so much real violence in the world? Or...is there?

On today’s show we create our own hypothetical evening news channel. The Re-Engineered News Network! And we start by examining how much airtime we’d have to dedicate to boring crimes compared to murders, if we want our news to be representative of actual crime rates. Then we discuss the many, many biases baked into the human mind that make us want to share, binge, and sample violent stories. We’ll also discuss the actual per-capita rates of crime in general in the US, and how it’s trended throughout the last 60 years. Shockingly, it turns out 2020 actually looks a lot more like another generation as far as crime rates go.

Science Links:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/biases-make-people-vulnerable-to-misinformation-spread-by-social-media/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic#:~:text=The%20availability%20heuristic%2C%20also%20known,%2C%20concept%2C%20method%20or%20decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

https://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/currie.htm

https://fortune.com/2015/12/13/the-truest-measure-of-progress-for-americans/

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/there-are-better-ways-measure-progress

https://towardsdatascience.com/has-progress-in-america-peaked-9421f2e10a56

History Links:

https://www.ranker.com/list/journalists-who-lied/mel-judson