Cheer Up, Mass Media

by Paul Grimsley

Ever had one of those people who you ask how they are doing, and instead of being polite and saying OK, they launch into a laundry list of stuff that is going wrong in their life? Yeah, you don’t ask them again.

Ever have one of those people who, when you ask them what they think of your idea or plan give you a diatribe on how it is the worst thing they have ever heard, every time? Sure, you go elsewhere for your advice.

Imagine you wanted to tell people about your product and the copywriter came back with the buzzwords Cancer and Side Effects highlighted, and told everyone what a piece of crap it and you were? You might go find someone a bit more Don Draper for your campaign.

But Mass Media has this kind of problem. And it isn’t just a PR problem either. In a news cycle that last roughly 15 minutes you may get a human interest story slapped on the end as the sugar to help the medicine go down. In a newspaper the number of column inches dedicated to feelgood stories is likewise fairly minimal.

If you put down the newspaper, mute the people who share bad news on your Facebook wall, or even turn off some of that constant stream of negativity, and you step out into the world and actually interact you see that people aren’t so bad. If you travel around enough you see that you do not occupy a wasteland ravaged by nuclear weapons and over-run by terrorists, where everyone is dropping like flies.

The shift to the 24 hour News Cycle started a push to fill that time with content, and you have to keep people interested, so it has to have some amount of shock value. Most companies have their News Division firmly placed under the entertainment umbrella, and News shows, like any other, compete for ratings. Add in streaming on social media and you have the perfect recipe for a continual deluge of horribly depressing examples of the worst humanity has to offer, and if that is all you watch, then is it any wonder you have a bad idea of what the rest of the world looks like?

This isn’t to say that all of the things being reported on are wrong, or shouldn’t be looked at, but imagine if, for every story about the horror you got a complimentary story about the building of infrastructure, and stories about people solving problems, might it seem less hopeless? Might it strike you that there are things you are able to do?

Maybe we can wean mass media off of the horrorshow entirely? Imagine if you saw every situation in the world through the filter of the people actively working to handle it? If you create the idea that this is what is happening and you show people how it is carried out, you give them hope and the notion that there is a way to take responsibility.

Increasingly, even those within the media are starting to see the problem. Fake news and all the furor that grew up and around it resulted from an attenuation of the instrument that the media was supposed to be. It became about entertainment and not information — it sought not to inform but to titillate, and it became so much that way that it was ripe for someone to poke holes in it. The media cried wolf one too many times to sell a paper and then when they had some things they really wanted to say they wondered why they were suffering from a worse confidence rating than the politicians they were supposed to be a check and balance on.

Offering solutions instead of problems in a market where politicians are considered to make promises they have no intention of keeping, might make the media useful in a way that they have ceased to be. Who really reads the media to learn anything? You get a picture of the level of threat assessment for every area of life, but you are not getting tools to take you forward into a place where the problem has diminished. Maybe that should change.

Cheer up, Mass Media, there are answers, and you could be one of them.