Negative News: A Coruscant Corollary

Artist's depiction of a camera holder; image from Unsplash

Note: Apologies for the relatively short and slightly late post this month! As you may know, I spent the month of November doing NaNoWriMo, which took up a good deal of my writing time. Obviously, it's not ideal that my first post with a real schedule is late, but I'm hoping it won't be a problem in the future.

A quick explainer on this month's blog post! I originally intended for this to be a part of my post on the supposedly most Frequently Asked Questions, but it somehow slipped my mind in between the planning and writing stages. I didn't think it necessitated a full post then, but after sitting down and writing all of this and looking at the length, I'm glad I dedicated an entire post to it after all :D.

Anyhow, onto the regularly scheduled programming!

To be honest, I find myself disappointed with news coverage a lot of the time . . . which is ironic, because my preferred career field is journalism. It's not even the quality of the writing or the reporting that's underwhelming for me. It's the negativity that seems to underlie every story.

There are obviously plenty of ways to circumvent a particular brand of reporting these days. You could theoretically receive all of your news exclusively from a satirical site. You could also sign up for any number of newsletters promising to simplify the news and bring you only what's important. And obviously, with the rise in online news, there's a lot of choice and access available to alternate sources should you prefer a different point-of-view.

That said, I think the underlying problem remains. As a theoretical example: Two incidents occur on the same day. One is a local hit-and-run, and the other is a small business having a solid profit for the third straight month. If you asked most people to pick which ends up on the news over the other, they would typically pick the former. It seems logical; a hit-and-run could involve deaths or serious injuries, which is obviously far more important than someone making money. And if you turned on local TV news, you'd usually see the former show up far more than the latter.

Depiction of a small business that is supposedly a "happy birthday to you greeting card" (thanks anyway, Unsplash!)

But you can make a solid argument from the perspective of an individual viewer why the story about the small business is more important. A hit-and-run is really only a major event to a small group of people—typically the friends and family of the people involved in the incident and the law enforcement or healthcare individuals at the scene. A small business having a string of profitable months might not seem all that noteworthy, but it arguably carries a much greater overall impact, since its fortunes affect its employees and any dependent immediate family and quite a few customers/clients of that business. Depending on what kind of establishment it is, it could have a local cultural impact as well. Counterintuitively, it seems the small business's success impacts a lot more individuals than a hit-and-run does, and to a pretty significant degree to all of its employees! A hit-and-run can have the potential for traffic jams or other annoyances that affect a lot of people, but it usually doesn't have the same lasting impacts. So the argument that the hit-and-run is more newsworthy because it's more impactful doesn't seem like a terribly strong one.

However, unless it's some kind of specialized economic show, the story about the hit-and-run will usually air over the story about a small business's profits. It's not like TV channels don't air stories like the latter, but the former tends to get more preference. As another example, neither "some guy down the street got a raise at his job today" or "some guy down the street lost his wallet to a pickpocket today" means anything or provides much useful information to most viewers, but the latter is a lot likelier to show up in the news.

It seems that TV news is unnecessarily negative, with no clear informational benefit for its consumers.

This shouldn't be limited to TV news, though. Print news, websites, and even blogs like this one (the irony that I am writing a negative piece about negative pieces is not lost on me) are geared to prefer publishing bad or bad-related news—sometimes with different rationales, but producing the same effect in the end.

In some ways, this isn't surprising. Regardless of the relative importance of a story, it's the eye-catching ones that naturally gain more attention and are naturally published more, and something about the way humans are wired means that the eye-catching stories tend to lie on the negative side of the spectrum. 

However, the cause doesn't always have to be some evil goal of extracting your clicks and raking in sweet advertising money. For my blog, it makes more sense for me to write about how the status quo could be better, rather than in what ways it's already good, because that's what I find is useful to talk about. That is, my blog is about what isn't normal and needs to be talked about more, and if that mostly consists of negative topics, so be it. It simply isn't worthwhile to devote attention to positive topics when it's difficult to give an analysis at more than face value. (That said, it's for this reason that I want to include more lighthearted topics on my blog as well for being more entertaining, increasing the blog's wholesale readability, and switching it up.)

From a more general vantage point, the sheer quantity of negative news has an additional effect. It would be easy to conclude that murder rates are much higher than they are—even if significant, the statistical likelihood of it happening to you is usually not that high—simply because you hear about people getting murdered but never about people not getting murdered (something that I wish the fear-prone newspaper-devouring younger version of me knew). Without the understanding that what's published isn't purely based on what's "important" and that the information you receive is naturally going to be incomplete (I think it's also a difficult concept that you can't even make inferences or educated guesses because you simply do not know), it's easy to find mirages of patterns in the news that aren't reflective of reality.

    

A person reading a newspaper; image from Unsplash

I suppose this is the part of the post where I propose a solution. To be honest, though, I'm not sure what there is to be done. Media outlets can definitely move away from clickbait and the appeal to particularly negative sentiments *pointedly coughs at tabloids*, and maybe they can also start putting out stories about the small business that's recently had a great string of profits. But I think the inherent problem is that people just don't find positive things... interesting. "Positive news" and "wholesome content" are definitely popular, but I just can't envision someone receiving all of their information about the world from that kind of segment. People want to see something different—something that teaches them something new about the world—and if that results in the popularity of negative news, I'm not sure there's much we can do about it.

But the nice thing about this particular blog is that I don't have to fall into the same trap! My blog isn't designed to provide readers with all their news—it's designed to provide commentary on subjects that I care about, and that gives me the freedom to talk about things that aren't strictly news. It's also the reason why, despite having a decent-sized store of future post topics, I'm trying to put off some of them a little so that I can write about less heavy matters, too. I am admittedly resistant to committing to a schedule for casual and serious posts because I feel that adds unnecessary rigidity, but I hope the balance will work out regardless.

Thanks for reading this stream-of-thought-that's-vaguely-connected-to-the-blog, and I hope you're as excited for this blog as I am!

~ Coruscant