Main Stream Media is Making Us Feel Bad
The business model of mainstream media (MSM) is sick. Profit is made by making us feel bad, and it is not making our society better.
As long as algorithms’ goals are to keep us engaged and generate views and clicks, this will be a problem. Why? Because we are attracted to bad news, and the MSM is exploiting this. Journalists are people too, so they probably also want to write about positive things in our world, writing uplifting stories. But it seems they prefer to write about the next natural disaster, the next mass shooting, or the next corrupt politician. The problem is, good news doesn´t create clicks, doesn´t engage us, doesn´t keep us reading. In conclusion, it doesn´t generate money.
Negative News Bias
The news may be negative and strategy-focused because that is the kind of story people are interested in. A study was performed to test this hypothesis. (1) A lab study captured participants’ news-selection biases, alongside a survey capturing their stated news preferences. Politically interested participants were more likely to select negative stories. Interest was associated with a greater preference for strategic frames as well. The results suggest that behavioral effects do not conform to attitudinal ones. That is, regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content. (1)
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams
Fearmongering
Another study examined the role of the news media in promoting a public discourse of fear. (2) The emphasis was on the impact of media forms and frames for guiding the selection and presentation of reports emphasizing fear. The news media uses a “problem frame” as a secular version of a morality play. This promotes messages that resonate with fear. The problem frame’s role is part of the process of promoting widespread messages stressing fear and danger. (2) MSM is constantly broadcasting messages to the public that this world is extremely dangerous; that no matter what we do, our behavior does not matter, and that forward progress doesn’t really happen that often. (3)
Psychology
In psychology, this is called negativity bias. From an evolutionary perspective, this bias makes sense because it keeps us vigilant and aware of threats. But it also gives a stress reaction, and it is hard for us to distract ourselves from this. If this stress is continuous, it will make us feel unhappy and make us unproductive. For some people, consciously or unconsciously also schadenfreude plays a role. Schadenfreude is a complex emotion, where someone gets joyful feelings and takes pleasure from watching someone fail. This emotion is displayed more in children than in adults. However, adults also experience schadenfreude, although generally, they conceal it. The problem with schadenfreude is that it correlates with low self-esteem, jealousy, and envy, all emotions which don´t make us feel a better person. Another effect is that absorbing negative messages over time can lead people to “learned helplessness.” It’s the belief that our behavior doesn’t matter in the face of challenges. Far from being better informed, heavy news consumers end up miscalibrated and irrational due to a cognitive bias called the Availability Heuristic. It explains that people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind. It’s why people will rank COVID-19 as a higher threat than malaria or TBC.
Effects
Just a few minutes spent consuming negative news in the morning can affect the entire emotional trajectory of your day. (3) To be more precise, research done by Achor and Gielan, in conjunction with The Huffington Post, showed that watching just three minutes of negative news in the morning makes viewers 27 percent more likely to report having a bad day six to eight hours later. The news cycle has become “like play-by-play sports commentary.” To stay competitive, news agencies focus on discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition, rather than more considerable changes. Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. (4) Another consequence of that we tend to click on negative things is that it drives traffic, causing the negative to rise in search results. The higher the negative rises in search results, the more people click, reinforcing the negative
The reality is that we will continue to hear negative information from many sources. It lies in our will to decide whether to discard them into the waste bin or record them into our brains!
Israelmore Ayivor
Solutions
The Internet has changed a lot, and MSM is still working on the challenges this new medium pose. Subscribers were lost, profit-making models had to change. The model which is used now is not beneficial for us, the consumers, and us as a society. Keeping us engaged with positive news should be more rewarding for the companies. Advertisers could play a role in this; they are the ones who are paying. As an advertiser, it is better to be linked with positive news than with negative news. And we also have to change. It is too easy to blame the big companies for this. Think twice before clicking on a headline. We have to bolster our critical thinking. Keep in mind that every click will push that news article higher in the charts. Don´t share bad news on FB, Twitter, etc.; this will also cause the news article to be higher in the charts. And in the long run, what do you think our friends will think about you if you are always sharing the bad news? So for yourself and society as a whole, STOP clicking the bad news.
References
1. Trussler M., Soroka S. Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames. The International Journal of Press/Politics. 2014. 19: 3, 360–379. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1940161214524832
2. David L. Altheide (1997) “The News Media, the Problem Frame, and the Production of Fear”, The Sociological Quarterly, 38:4, 647–668, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1997.tb00758.x
3. M. Gielan. Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change. 2015
4. Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. 2019
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