The possibility that Times news coverage would simply dial back the hysteria was apparently inconceivable.

I am both dubious of the argument and at the same time recognize that there is a reasonable and empirical argument to be made.  From In Loco Masculi by Heather Mac Donald.  The subheading is The feminization of the American university is all but complete.

And if the argument is actually correct, then the consequences are severe.

Mac Donald provides some of the empirical underpinnings of the argument.  I was more interested in this part of the essay.  Fits with my concern that the mainstream media, in its effort to catastrophize everything, is worsening public discourse.  Bold for emphasis.

As long as the rhetoric of safety, threat, and trauma remains dominant, the push to shut down non-progressive speech will continue. And now the traumification of everyday life, like other modern academic trends, is fast spreading outside the campus. Emotional-healing coaches help the public “navigate” trauma in the “space of healing and self-development,” as a press release for one such coach, Rebeccah Silence, put it. The media operate in full trauma mode. The use of the word “trauma” in New York Times news stories rose by nearly 30 percent between 2020 and 2021 and by nearly 300 percent from 2000 to 2021. In a June 22, 2022, email to the paper’s senior editors, a Times standards editor said that he was sympathetic to this impulse. After all, the standards editor wrote, “mass shootings, a pandemic, war, the murder of George Floyd and an attack on the U.S. Capitol” had left “wounds, shock and scarring in their wake.” A college president could not have put it better. But trauma, the editor suggested, didn’t need to be the Times’s “go-to term for any and all stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds.” Alternatives? How about: “stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds,” the editor proposed. The possibility that Times news coverage would simply dial back the hysteria was apparently inconceivable.

Emotionalism is far cheaper than empiricism so I don't think we can count on the mainstream media weaning itself off that particular addiction.  Like other addictions though, it is terribly damaging.