Fascinating! Well if y'all haven't already, it would be great if you could publish a study of your findings; what you're describing is basically the exact opposite of what I expected based on other reporting.
Gentle reminder that news reporting is not a representative sample of, well, just about anything. It's highly selected and filtered through several layers. The same is true of a survey of internet posts, or online surveys btw. It's very hard to get representative samples.
Strong agree, you have to keep selection bias in mind. But I would expect news reporting to not be the exact opposite of what was being proposed in the comment -- bias and all!
