Soft News

What it is

Soft news is a measuring category before it is an opinion about journalism. The term sets news about public affairs, the hard news of government, policy and elections, against news about routine crime, accidents, disasters and celebrities. Thomas Patterson's 2000 report for Harvard's Shorenstein Center gave the category a working definition for counting: his soft news includes routine crime, accident and disaster stories along with celebrity stories and similar material.

What he counted was 5,331 news stories. The sample spanned television, newspapers and newsmagazines, and the period he studied began in 1980. Over that period the soft share of coverage rose from less than 35 per cent to about 50 per cent. The figure is for the three kinds of outlet together, so it describes the news as a whole and does not isolate television.

Patterson gave a commercial explanation. His report says that outlets softened their coverage, and became more critical in tone, in response to competition from cable and entertainment. It also says the change did not stop the decline in news audiences. His argument is that hard news, not soft news, is what draws people to the news, and the report's own words are that soft news and critical journalism "may now be hastening the decline in news audiences". The central claim of the report is that attracting audiences and informing the public are compatible and mutually reinforcing.

Matthew Baum uses the word for a different object. In his 2002 paper in the American Political Science Review and his 2003 book Soft News Goes to War, soft news is a family of entertainment-oriented outlets, news programmes and talk shows among them, and the question is who watches them and what they pick up. The paper found that foreign crises presented in these outlets reached politically uninvolved Americans and reduced the disparity in attentiveness between segments of the public. The book's abstract describes the mechanism as a byproduct: soft news frames scandal and violence, especially attacks against America, as entertainment, which draws viewers who then follow foreign crises for their entertainment value even if they have no interest in foreign policy itself. The same abstract reports that watching soft news reinforces isolationist attitudes among many inattentive Americans.

The two usages are compatible but not identical. Patterson counts a kind of story. Baum identifies a kind of outlet. A crime report in a newspaper is soft news for Patterson and does not figure in Baum's design, while a talk-show segment on a foreign crisis is soft news for Baum and might not be soft news by Patterson's content test. Anyone citing a figure for soft news should say which of the two is meant.

In effect

Research: counting the stories

Patterson's report is the clearest case of soft news used as a count. A total of 5,331 stories were coded, and the rise from under 35 per cent to about 50 per cent is a statement about the mix of stories, not about any one outlet or any one story. The measure makes the first part of Neil Postman's claim testable. If news is turning into entertainment, the entertainment-like share of news should be rising, and across the outlets Patterson sampled it was. What the count cannot show is why, or what it did to viewers. For the why, Patterson points to competition. For the what, see Media Choice and Knowledge Gaps.

Everyday life: the foreign crisis on an entertainment programme

Baum's setting is ordinary. A person tunes in for entertainment and comes away aware that a foreign crisis is under way. His statistical comparison of individual media use with attention to recent foreign crises found that crises presented through entertainment-oriented soft news reached politically uninvolved Americans. The effect is on attention, by his measure, and not on understanding. The book adds a cost: for many inattentive viewers, soft news reinforced isolationist attitudes.

Commerce: the penny paper and the moon

Soft news as a business strategy is older than broadcasting. Tim Wu dates the trade in readers' attention to the penny Sun of 1833. In 1835 the Sun ran a series reporting life on the moon, winged man-bats among it, and JSTOR Daily reports that circulation rose to 19,360, making it the most widely read newspaper in the world. A rival penny paper founded that year specialised in violent death. Wu's summary is that within five years the penny papers had discovered "the public's weakness for death and violence, incessant trolling, and, finally, fake news" (p. 18). The commercial logic Patterson found in the 1980s and 1990s was visible in 1835, which is a reason to doubt that the television screen is its origin.

What it does not say

Soft news is not the same as false news, trivial news or bad journalism. Patterson's category groups routine crime, accident, disaster and celebrity stories by subject, and a subject says nothing about how well a story is reported.

The 50 per cent figure covers television, newspapers and newsmagazines together. It cannot be read as a measure of television alone, and this page has the report's headline numbers from a summary and the Shorenstein Center's description, not the full text of the report.

Baum measured attention to crises, not depth of understanding, and his book's finding of reinforced isolationism is a reminder that reaching an inattentive viewer is not the same as informing that viewer well.

Markus Prior's work points the other way on who is left behind: entertainment-minded viewers left the news altogether once they had alternatives. The two findings can both stand, because Baum's concern is what reaches people who watch soft news and Prior's is what happens to people who stop watching news.

Finally, the drift in coverage and the drift in knowledge are separate questions. A rising soft share does not by itself show that audiences know less, and this page does not claim it.

Who developed it

There is no single originator, and the term is older than the sources used here. Patterson's 2000 report supplies the share measure used on this site, and Baum's work supplies the findings about audiences. See Thomas Patterson and Matthew Baum.

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