Bad News! Bad News Sells
When you open your newspaper or your newsfeed on your phone, what do you see? Take a second before you continue reading this to examine the type of news that cover the pages. Scroll down and read the titles. I’ll wait.
Every day we are bombarded by stories about war, terrorism, crime, pollution, inequality, drug abuse, oppression and more. It’s not just the headlines. It’s the op-eds and long form stories, the comedy news shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and your local news station. Be it online, in the paper, on the telly or radio, there is a vast predominance of negative news.
Is the world really getting worse? Well, it doesn’t matter, because the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us believe that it is.
News is about what happens. You don’t see a journalist sitting in front of the camera saying, “I’m reporting from a city that hasn’t been attacked by terrorists.” You don’t hear about all the schools that haven’t been shot up, all the cities that haven’t been blown up or all the countries that haven’t been at war for 40 years.
Unfortunately, as long as bad things happen, there will be negative news on your newsfeed. Especially now that there are billions of smartphones around the globe that constantly record the bad things that happen.
