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A comment on Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops. Parent comment

Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by sp332 on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @12:02AM (#9378816)
If law enforcement is on average generating more negative newsworthy incidents than positive ones, then the unbiased thing to do is to publish a proportionally higher number of negative articles. You'd have to weight the incidents by importance and see if they are more likely to publish less important negative articles and less likely to publish more important positive articles.
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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by rpo3po on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @12:11AM (#9378835)
This, too, begins with a false premise: that journalists are equally likely to seek out positive and negative stories, and to give both of them equal importance. That is a naive assumption, unfortunately, and the facts of reporting - bad events make for good copy - prove it entirely false.
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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by sp332 on Thursday April 16, 2015 @01:04PM (#9389245)
It's not false, just oversimplified. I swept all that complexity under the word "newsworthy".
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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by megablast on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @01:44AM (#9379082)
This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

Of course, it is a lot harder to prove if you are saying something different than the truth.

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Re:Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on driv... by wtbob on Wednesday April 15, 2015 @07:03AM (#9380083)
> This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

I think that's likely to be a lot more difficult than you think: how does an independent observer know what the count of good and bad events is, rather than the count of good & bad published events? The trouble is that if an event isn't published, it's practically invisible to an observer.

This is a related issue to the fact that many sensational crimes are less common today, but perceived to be more common due to over-coverage in the media.

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