The Influence of Bad and Negative News on One's Day

Every day we watch, hear or read about another tragedy or national disaster occurring, desensitizing us to gun violence, corruption, human suffering and natural disasters. Most often, the pubic unites for moments or days to mourn or express other emotions and then resumes their daily lives after tweeting out a trending hashtag to shock, dismay or support. We are becoming overexposed to negativity and heartbreak. This lends itself to the question: Is there really more bad news than good news? A study by the Pew Research Center for People & Press that examined the news stories from over 165 surveys shows that patterns in American news coverage has remained consistent and unchanging for the past 20 years. The study concluded that war and terrorism related stories have consistently remained the most interest-generating and therefore most extensively covered stories since 1986.

What accounts media’s acute focus on negative events over positive events? A simple answer is that “bad news sells.” Yet, despite the fact that this trend has been in place for the past two decades, patterns in viewership have altered significantly during this time. While in the 1980s, about 30 percent of Americans followed the news “very closely,” this number decreased by seven percent in the 1990s before rising to 30 percent again at the start of the 21st century. Regardless of these fluctuations, Americans show the greatest interest in media reports about war and terrorism, with bad weather and natural disasters closely following, politics, crime and health falling in a middle-ground, and entertainment and science yielding the fewest viewers. The fact that about 90 percent of news Americans hear is negative, the study concludes that there is not necessarily more bad news than good news occurring in the world. Rather, American audiences are simply more compelled toward negative news than positive news. The City Reporter conducted an experiment to test this explanation. After changing the perspective of their stories to appear more positive and covering generally more uplifting stories for one day, the news audience viewing decreased by two thirds. Even small changes made to focus on the positives, such as saying that there is no disruption in traffic despite bad weather, changed viewer behavior.

One could conclude that the reason behind the media’s focus on negativity is not found in the ratio of bad news to good news, but instead in the psychological human tendency to focus on the negative and remember negative memories more clearly than positive ones. However, this tendency is not only a cause of the media’s bias toward negative stories but also an effect of this bias. While news outlets do have to ensure that their stories are audience-generating to attract sponsor revenue and therefore have to respond to the preferences of their viewers, the stories they choose to cover also play an important role in shaping their audience’s outlook on the world and opinion on current events.

Author of the Pew Research Center’s media study, Michael J. Robinson, argues the media’s choice in stories plays more of a role on the audience’s preferences than the other way around: “The national news audience does not shift its news diet nearly so quickly as news organizations shift their news menu.” This relationship does not come without consequences. By focusing primarily on negative news, the media allows people to believe that there is primarily bad things and people in the world and in turn have a despairing outlook on the world. This can fuel a rather pessimistic society and dissuade people from seeking the good in the world, potentially altering the actions our society takes to remedy the issues that plague us. There’s also reinforcing media behavior. Acknowledging that negative news generates greater audience numbers can cause news outlets to exaggerate minor negative stories in a fast news cycle in order to increase viewership. And technology has aided the rapid fire negative news cycle by including “ticker-tape” message banners scrolling across the TV screens as though the main screen was insufficient to sustain the viewers’ attention.