The mainstream American news media is under siege from the political right, but for the wrong reasons. To the hyper-partisan political elites, small inequities in slant matter a lot. But hyperventilating about small issues doesn’t magically turn them into serious problems. It just makes them loom larger. And takes the focus away from the much more serious problems. The big afflictions of ‘MSM’ are: vacuity, sensationalism, a preference for opinions over facts, poor understanding of important issues, and disinterest in covering them diligently, disinterest in what goes on outside American borders, a poor understanding of numbers, policy myopia—covering events rather than issues, and fixation with breaking news.
Here we shed light on a small piece of the real estate: the provision of ‘not news.’ By ‘not news’ we mean news about cooking, travel, fashion, home decor, and such. We are very conservative in what we code as ‘not news,’ leaving news about health, anything local, and such in place.
We analyze provision of ‘not news’ in The New York Times (NYT), the nation’s newspaper of record. NYT is both well-regarded and popular. It has won more Pulitzer awards than any other newspaper. And it is the 30th most visited website in the U.S. (as of October 2017).
So, has the proportion of news stories about topics unrelated to politics or the economy, such as cooking, travel, fashion, music, etc., in NYT gone up over time? (For issues related to measurement, see here.) As the figure shows, the net provision of not news increased by 10 percentage points between 1987 and 2007.
Interested in learning about more ways in which NYT has changed over time? See here.