Last year featured a large sample of breathless reporting and bad takes regarding the economy, crime, and the mid-term elections. I’m calling this, the journalism of artificial panic.

For most of the summer and early fall, mainstream media concern trolled all three topics relentlessly.

That’s not to say these weren’t real, and important stories. In fact, all three were very important. But , journalists, and the news organizations they work for, chose to highlight the worst case scenarios. In many cases, these worst cases merely parroted right wing talking points. This led people to a lot of misperceptions of reality. Some of them, intentional.