14 ms·

Former newspaper city editor here. With few exceptions, positive stories -- although readers clamored for them in surveys -- never drove newsrack sales the way

Former newspaper city editor here. With few exceptions, positive stories -- although readers clamored for them in surveys -- never drove newsrack sales the way negative stories did. That's why we had a whole section for feel-good features but they didn't usually get prime front-page real estate. In the age of infinite content, headlines have become a sort of drama arms race. But the basic dynamic of what works and what doesn't for drawing in readers hasn't changed.

pmarreck 4y ago
Do you think this is just how we're wired? What is so extremely disappointing to me is that, across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite, thanks to this perverse incentive.
- VLM 4y ago
  Most people don't read online news. Online news is a subculture at this point and they're not interested in happy stories so happy stories are not produced.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  Not a psychologist but I feel like appreciating things are more of a learned trait but jealousy and wanting are natural.
- RajT88 4y ago
  > many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite Online news (as well as cable news) in particular has taken to farming any kinds of changes to society as moral decay. Airing or printing only outrage is a business model unto its own. See: Huffpost, Breitbart for examples.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- themitigating 4y ago
  Politicians are also pushing the notion that things are getting worse for support and those politicians are supported by news networks who may skew coverage.
- pydry 4y ago
  >across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving Are they the things that matter to the people who have the perception, though? I don't think it's all about the news.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  I'd argue that people's impression of the world is going to be driven largely by their own perspective, not media. Borrowing a quote [1] from Stephen Pinker, probably the most visible advocate for 'things are getting better' : "... the United States is an outlier among rich Western democracies, with a stagnation in happiness and higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity and premature death.... " Many of these issues are ones people are going to be aware of, and that is going to impact, them on a day to day basis. And that's going to inform their decisions much more than whatever the news is saying. And that was written back in 2018 which absolutely feels like the "good ole days" compared to now a days! [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02/13/a-famed-harvard-professor-explains-why-the-world-is-actually-becoming-a-much-better-place/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02...
- jimt1234 4y ago
  > Do you think this is just how we're wired? I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.
mmaunder 4y ago
“Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” -Nightcrawler
- terran57 4y ago
  I find myself nodding in agreement.
milsorgen 4y ago
It makes sense at a surface level, if you ignore negative information it could potentially lead to negative outcomes for yourself. If you ignore positive news, what's the worst that could happen if you're caught unawares? Something positive or at least personally benign?
- Gare 4y ago
  Yes, we are primed as animals that we are to be scared and vigilant. Because that ensured survival.
  - Forestessential 4y ago
    heedfullness and fear are closely related. similar to hate and resolve.
  - attemptone 4y ago
    We were also primed to seek comfort and stability. Because that ensured survival. Like OOP said, that was a surface level thought. Finding evidence in evolutionary psychology seems like a big leap from that.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      I don't really think that's a good counterexample News of bad event could directly impinge survival. News of a good thing happening to someone far away does not really improve comfort and stability.
      - attemptone 4y ago
        News of a bad thing happening to someone far away does not really impact survival as well. The point was not about providing a good counter-example. I wanted to show that when one hand-waves away a behavoiur to an abstract selection criteria, one can easily come up with criteria that contradicts that notion.
  - themitigating 4y ago
mistermann 4y ago
Has anyone tried a serious meta-approach: introducing the public to the notion and methods of contemplating the nature and consequences of the abstract phenomenon itself?
adamrezich 4y ago
sometime around the 2016 US Presidential elections, when outragebait headlines had arguably achieved a local maximum, I will now never forget how I overcame headline rage forever. I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH— suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage! woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit? since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point! I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.
joegahona 4y ago
I used to work at a food/recipe publication and had a similar experience -- users constantly complained that they wanted more healthy recipes, but those types of recipes always performed poorly. Meatloaf and other comfort foods dominated traffic. This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Is meatloaf really unhealthy?
  - ragingrobot 4y ago
    I suppose that depends on the meat you use and how else it's prepared. Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy. Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick. Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.
  - Merad 4y ago
    I wouldn't call it unhealthy, unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy. It does retain most of the fat from the ground beef which would cook out of normal burgers or hamburger steak. But it's also more filling than either of those due the fat and the inclusion of bread crumbs or oatmeal as filler.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy It's not a mindset, any more than gravity is a mindset.
65 4y ago
As they say, "If it's a bad day, it's a good day!"
- ta1243 4y ago
  If it bleeds, it leads
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
And thus, because profit motive drives literally everything (because it's impossible to forestall a takeover if you're broke) then all news-media trend toward maximum tolerable negativity. That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire. While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  I don't observe "maximum tolerable negativity". Could you give an example, maybe a link to a serious news website that looks this way?
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    https://www.cnn.com/ https://www.cnn.com/ as of 10:47ET: 32 links to stories above the fold for my browser 3 are emotionally neutral or positive --------------------------------------- https://www.foxnews.com/ https://www.foxnews.com/: 6 links to stories above the fold 0 are emotionally neutral or positive The only thing next is to just be the violence network
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      That doesn't support the claims about 'negativity' and especially about 'maximum tolerable'.
KoftaBob 4y ago
What got me to break out of this habit is realizing that the vast majority of what news sites/tv report on isn't remotely actionable or relevant for the average viewer. It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage. We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.
- gwbrooks 4y ago
  ^^^ This right here. Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.
- warner25 4y ago
  I've moved towards this too, for better or worse. Between 18-25, I was very passionate about national politics and macroeconomics and consumed by following political news and fiery debates, as many young people are. As my adult responsibilities grew, I realized that the national political stuff was either irrelevant to my day-to-day life experience and / or not something that I could affect much (not actionable, as you said), and the return-on-investment of my time and attention on more immediate things was much higher. In my 30s now, I almost exclusively read and listen to things closely related to my own work and family finances and health. I guess there's a downside of political disengagement for society, though. Old people seem to become more engaged again when they have more free time, but maybe we end up with this donut hole of representation among people who are in the middle of working full-time and raising kids.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Do these fiery debates help? I say as someone who also was like this in my late teens. I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats. If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does. I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.
bachmeier 4y ago
This is in no way an attack on you, but your post shows exactly the problem. You first wrote > With few exceptions, positive stories and then you wrote > a whole section for feel-good features "Positive news" is more or less orthogonal to "feel-good features". When I moved to my current job, I had the option of watching Kansas City news or Topeka news. The KC news stations took the route you're suggesting. Everything was negative and intended to shock/alarm ("Joe Smith was murdered and then the police were involved in a car chase to catch the murderer. When they shot out his tires, he took his own life.") The Topeka stations did mostly positive news, with some negative mixed in. As any sane person would do, it didn't take long for me to go with only the Topeka news. It was nice to know what was going on in the area, to see a review of a local restaurant, or to hear about the debate on a change in the sales tax. I don't watch the news to see someone's good luck.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  I've noticed some programming and sources have sort of jammed feel-good pieces in some weird attempt to counter balance things. People dying on Ukraine, banks defaulting, Little Timmy in nowhere USA is taking steps to setup his lemonade stand and donate to the local food shelter to make a difference. Don't get me wrong, I think efforts like Little Timmy's are great and in the scope of their lives is probably significant. It doesn't however hit the level of magnitude/significance and scope of their negative counter parts. It's only in local news sources that I tend to see a better balance of things that truly effect, are relevant to me, and aren't full of doom and gloom.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
    Also there are often "feel good" stories that are really quite negative in disguise. "Little Timmy started a GoFundMe to pay off his school lunch debt, and all his friends donated!" and other dystopian "seems nice but is actually horrifying" content.
wrp 4y ago
Tell me, Avram, surely somewhere there are good things happening? Can't you buy a paper that prints those things? --The Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Spectacles drive the news. It's easier to frame a negative issue as a spectacle than a positive. Say you have a local festival. That's supposed to happen. There's no news there except for the time and date the festival is open, and any new or interesting things can be found by going there. Car drives into a festival and runs over some people? Wow, unexpected. Might wanna read about that and get the details. But if your local high school football team wins a state title? You'll sell that paper out. Local refinery explodes? Likewise.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
If it bleeds it leads
silisili 4y ago
Is it possible it's a scale/impact issue? I tried subscribing to good news, and most of it seemed...just not newsworthy. Small happenings? But large notable news probably still drives clicks, yeah? The moon landing was the most watched program in history, after all.
nonethewiser 4y ago
If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is. This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment. To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news. I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.
- indymike 4y ago
  > If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is. I suspect discussing knowledge of the news is some kind of social signaling.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by this. In particular what "knowledge of the news" is. What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.
    - MikeSchurman 4y ago
      I think what they mean is that, someone knowing what is happening in the world, and being able to discuss those things, could be seen as them being part of a certain level/caste in society. Being able to discuss issues, being seen as intelligent and knowledgeable. Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them. It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.
ar-nelson 4y ago
The way I see it, news serves three purposes: --- 1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you. 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions. 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else). --- #1 is the reason that news feels important enough that tuning it out completely feels irresponsible, but it's a very small component of most news. #2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work, but it's so easy to manipulate, and the incentive to manipulate it is so high, that it's questionable whether this type of news has ever existed without being more manipulation than fact---and this has been true since long before the internet. #3 is the real reason most people (myself included) read news, even when they convince themselves it's #1 or #2. And it becomes unhealthy because, as long as you're convinced you need to care deeply about what you're reading because it's actually #1 or #2, it will inspire constant anxiety. I would be interested to see a type of (perhaps government-funded) news service whose sole purpose is to publish only news that fits into category #1: if it is not reasonably likely to affect the average reader in an actionable way in the next 6 months, then it can't be published in this outlet.
- vasco 4y ago
  > it will inspire constant anxiety Realize that while they might make it more likely for some, this is not the default. You should not feel anxious just consuming regular news. If you do you should probably talk to a doctor as this seems like an unhealthy thing.
- claytongulick 4y ago
  State sponsored media generally hasn't worked out too well.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    BBC is one of the best news sources around. For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics. PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be. Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).
agumonkey 4y ago
Do you think it's always been the case ? I have a strange belief that people before the 60s, through harsher lives, were a lot more resilient and thus less interested by petty news cycles.
- csharpminor 4y ago
  I highly recommend reading old press clippings from your area. Reading headlines from 100 years ago personally made me feel as though not much has changed.
VonGuard 4y ago
If it bleeds, it leads.
TorontoTheGood 4y ago
You sort of get to see this in real time on Reddit, upvotes generally goes to stuff that upsets people.
amjnsx 4y ago
My theory is that people want to read about things that make themselves feel better. Bad news usually does that - in that it helps us reflect that “well at least i’m not THAT guy!”
sheepybloke 4y ago
I feel like you could break up negative stories into a lot of batches. Would you say the type of negative stories have changed? Maybe towards more outrage or drama stories instead of fear-based stories?

pmarreck 4y ago

Do you think this is just how we're wired? What is so extremely disappointing to me is that, across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite, thanks to this perverse incentive.

VLM 4y ago
Most people don't read online news. Online news is a subculture at this point and they're not interested in happy stories so happy stories are not produced.
Aperocky 4y ago
Not a psychologist but I feel like appreciating things are more of a learned trait but jealousy and wanting are natural.
RajT88 4y ago
> many things seem to be improving, yet the perception most people have of reality is the complete opposite Online news (as well as cable news) in particular has taken to farming any kinds of changes to society as moral decay. Airing or printing only outrage is a business model unto its own. See: Huffpost, Breitbart for examples.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
themitigating 4y ago
Politicians are also pushing the notion that things are getting worse for support and those politicians are supported by news networks who may skew coverage.
pydry 4y ago
>across many objective measures, many things seem to be improving Are they the things that matter to the people who have the perception, though? I don't think it's all about the news.
somenameforme 4y ago
I'd argue that people's impression of the world is going to be driven largely by their own perspective, not media. Borrowing a quote [1] from Stephen Pinker, probably the most visible advocate for 'things are getting better' : "... the United States is an outlier among rich Western democracies, with a stagnation in happiness and higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity and premature death.... " Many of these issues are ones people are going to be aware of, and that is going to impact, them on a day to day basis. And that's going to inform their decisions much more than whatever the news is saying. And that was written back in 2018 which absolutely feels like the "good ole days" compared to now a days! [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02/13/a-famed-harvard-professor-explains-why-the-world-is-actually-becoming-a-much-better-place/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02...
jimt1234 4y ago
> Do you think this is just how we're wired? I think the way the news is reported says more about us than it does about the organizations that do the reporting. If we didn't want all the negativity, we would reject it, and they'd stop reporting it. But that doesn't happen. So, essentially, we want all the negativity - yes, it's how we're wired. We just don't want to accept it.

mmaunder 4y ago

“Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” -Nightcrawler

terran57 4y ago
I find myself nodding in agreement.

milsorgen 4y ago

It makes sense at a surface level, if you ignore negative information it could potentially lead to negative outcomes for yourself. If you ignore positive news, what's the worst that could happen if you're caught unawares? Something positive or at least personally benign?

Gare 4y ago
Yes, we are primed as animals that we are to be scared and vigilant. Because that ensured survival.
- Forestessential 4y ago
  heedfullness and fear are closely related. similar to hate and resolve.
- attemptone 4y ago
  We were also primed to seek comfort and stability. Because that ensured survival. Like OOP said, that was a surface level thought. Finding evidence in evolutionary psychology seems like a big leap from that.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I don't really think that's a good counterexample News of bad event could directly impinge survival. News of a good thing happening to someone far away does not really improve comfort and stability.
    - attemptone 4y ago
      News of a bad thing happening to someone far away does not really impact survival as well. The point was not about providing a good counter-example. I wanted to show that when one hand-waves away a behavoiur to an abstract selection criteria, one can easily come up with criteria that contradicts that notion.
- themitigating 4y ago

mistermann 4y ago

Has anyone tried a serious meta-approach: introducing the public to the notion and methods of contemplating the nature and consequences of the abstract phenomenon itself?

adamrezich 4y ago

sometime around the 2016 US Presidential elections, when outragebait headlines had arguably achieved a local maximum, I will now never forget how I overcame headline rage forever. I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH— suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage! woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit? since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point! I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.

joegahona 4y ago

I used to work at a food/recipe publication and had a similar experience -- users constantly complained that they wanted more healthy recipes, but those types of recipes always performed poorly. Meatloaf and other comfort foods dominated traffic. This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Is meatloaf really unhealthy?
- ragingrobot 4y ago
  I suppose that depends on the meat you use and how else it's prepared. Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy. Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick. Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.
- Merad 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it unhealthy, unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy. It does retain most of the fat from the ground beef which would cook out of normal burgers or hamburger steak. But it's also more filling than either of those due the fat and the inclusion of bread crumbs or oatmeal as filler.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy It's not a mindset, any more than gravity is a mindset.

65 4y ago

As they say, "If it's a bad day, it's a good day!"

ta1243 4y ago
If it bleeds, it leads

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

And thus, because profit motive drives literally everything (because it's impossible to forestall a takeover if you're broke) then all news-media trend toward maximum tolerable negativity. That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire. While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.

wolverine876 4y ago
I don't observe "maximum tolerable negativity". Could you give an example, maybe a link to a serious news website that looks this way?
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  https://www.cnn.com/ https://www.cnn.com/ as of 10:47ET: 32 links to stories above the fold for my browser 3 are emotionally neutral or positive --------------------------------------- https://www.foxnews.com/ https://www.foxnews.com/: 6 links to stories above the fold 0 are emotionally neutral or positive The only thing next is to just be the violence network
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    That doesn't support the claims about 'negativity' and especially about 'maximum tolerable'.

KoftaBob 4y ago

What got me to break out of this habit is realizing that the vast majority of what news sites/tv report on isn't remotely actionable or relevant for the average viewer. It's basically something that scratches the itch of human curiosity, but with manipulative and lowest common denominator garbage. We'd all be better off if we scratched that curiosity itch by reading about things we're interested in, rather than current events.

gwbrooks 4y ago
^^^ This right here. Most daily-or-faster reporting is so shallow that consuming the information may, at times, be a net-negative to your understanding of whatever issue they're reporting about.
warner25 4y ago
I've moved towards this too, for better or worse. Between 18-25, I was very passionate about national politics and macroeconomics and consumed by following political news and fiery debates, as many young people are. As my adult responsibilities grew, I realized that the national political stuff was either irrelevant to my day-to-day life experience and / or not something that I could affect much (not actionable, as you said), and the return-on-investment of my time and attention on more immediate things was much higher. In my 30s now, I almost exclusively read and listen to things closely related to my own work and family finances and health. I guess there's a downside of political disengagement for society, though. Old people seem to become more engaged again when they have more free time, but maybe we end up with this donut hole of representation among people who are in the middle of working full-time and raising kids.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Do these fiery debates help? I say as someone who also was like this in my late teens. I do local advocacy for transit and civic planning related purposes in a US city. A lot of the "work" is really boring, just going to long public meetings and listening to SMEs drone about very specific issues. But that's where the sausage gets made. Our local transportation department is very receptive to the public's urban concerns and is doing a lot of great work. But they're blocked right now. Not just because their funding is uncertain or due to cranky old neighbors, but mostly because they have staff shortages as Baby Boomers retire. There's nothing we activists can do about this, we can't campaign for a measure or bill that puts butts into seats. If you go to Youtube or online North American urbanist forums though, folks aren't interested in these local issues at all. A lot of it is raving and ranting about how the US puts cars first and hates its people. This is fun to get emotional about (and believe me I've had enough close run-ins with cars as a pedestrian or cyclist to feel the rage) but doesn't actually materially affect our local urban conditions. But it's a lot less fun to talk about budget appropriation and staffing politics and much more fun to get angry at the GM Streetcar Conspiracy, so nobody does. I'm not saying these topics aren't important; if you're new to the issue it's important to understand why North American built environments are the way they are. But what's more important is working to change the reality around you, not getting wrapped up in online debates.

bachmeier 4y ago

This is in no way an attack on you, but your post shows exactly the problem. You first wrote > With few exceptions, positive stories and then you wrote > a whole section for feel-good features "Positive news" is more or less orthogonal to "feel-good features". When I moved to my current job, I had the option of watching Kansas City news or Topeka news. The KC news stations took the route you're suggesting. Everything was negative and intended to shock/alarm ("Joe Smith was murdered and then the police were involved in a car chase to catch the murderer. When they shot out his tires, he took his own life.") The Topeka stations did mostly positive news, with some negative mixed in. As any sane person would do, it didn't take long for me to go with only the Topeka news. It was nice to know what was going on in the area, to see a review of a local restaurant, or to hear about the debate on a change in the sales tax. I don't watch the news to see someone's good luck.

Frost1x 4y ago
I've noticed some programming and sources have sort of jammed feel-good pieces in some weird attempt to counter balance things. People dying on Ukraine, banks defaulting, Little Timmy in nowhere USA is taking steps to setup his lemonade stand and donate to the local food shelter to make a difference. Don't get me wrong, I think efforts like Little Timmy's are great and in the scope of their lives is probably significant. It doesn't however hit the level of magnitude/significance and scope of their negative counter parts. It's only in local news sources that I tend to see a better balance of things that truly effect, are relevant to me, and aren't full of doom and gloom.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
  Also there are often "feel good" stories that are really quite negative in disguise. "Little Timmy started a GoFundMe to pay off his school lunch debt, and all his friends donated!" and other dystopian "seems nice but is actually horrifying" content.

wrp 4y ago

Tell me, Avram, surely somewhere there are good things happening? Can't you buy a paper that prints those things? --The Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Spectacles drive the news. It's easier to frame a negative issue as a spectacle than a positive. Say you have a local festival. That's supposed to happen. There's no news there except for the time and date the festival is open, and any new or interesting things can be found by going there. Car drives into a festival and runs over some people? Wow, unexpected. Might wanna read about that and get the details. But if your local high school football team wins a state title? You'll sell that paper out. Local refinery explodes? Likewise.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

If it bleeds it leads

silisili 4y ago

Is it possible it's a scale/impact issue? I tried subscribing to good news, and most of it seemed...just not newsworthy. Small happenings? But large notable news probably still drives clicks, yeah? The moon landing was the most watched program in history, after all.

nonethewiser 4y ago

If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is. This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment. To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news. I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.

indymike 4y ago
> If the news is inherently skewed towards negativity then maybe it's not as valuable as we assume it is. I suspect discussing knowledge of the news is some kind of social signaling.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by this. In particular what "knowledge of the news" is. What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.
  - MikeSchurman 4y ago
    I think what they mean is that, someone knowing what is happening in the world, and being able to discuss those things, could be seen as them being part of a certain level/caste in society. Being able to discuss issues, being seen as intelligent and knowledgeable. Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them. It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.

ar-nelson 4y ago

The way I see it, news serves three purposes: --- 1. To let you know about local or world events that could affect you and those close to you. 2. To let you know about world events that affect others far away, in order to judge the effectiveness of political decisions and the necessity of future political decisions. 3. As a form of entertainment derived from the ongoing story of world history (or celebrity gossip, or whatever else). --- #1 is the reason that news feels important enough that tuning it out completely feels irresponsible, but it's a very small component of most news. #2 is perhaps necessary for democracy to work, but it's so easy to manipulate, and the incentive to manipulate it is so high, that it's questionable whether this type of news has ever existed without being more manipulation than fact---and this has been true since long before the internet. #3 is the real reason most people (myself included) read news, even when they convince themselves it's #1 or #2. And it becomes unhealthy because, as long as you're convinced you need to care deeply about what you're reading because it's actually #1 or #2, it will inspire constant anxiety. I would be interested to see a type of (perhaps government-funded) news service whose sole purpose is to publish only news that fits into category #1: if it is not reasonably likely to affect the average reader in an actionable way in the next 6 months, then it can't be published in this outlet.

vasco 4y ago
> it will inspire constant anxiety Realize that while they might make it more likely for some, this is not the default. You should not feel anxious just consuming regular news. If you do you should probably talk to a doctor as this seems like an unhealthy thing.
claytongulick 4y ago
State sponsored media generally hasn't worked out too well.
- paulmd 4y ago
  BBC is one of the best news sources around. For a long time, Al Jazeera was great on anything that didn't directly impact Qatari domestic politics. PBS is pretty fantastic overall and serves a lot of niches that aren't served by commercialized media and really shouldn't be. Like yes if you set out to make a state-sponsored propaganda agency then that's what you get (see: Voice of America, etc), but state sponsorship of media doesn't inherently corrupt. If anything it's the opposite and really the accusations of bias end up being a way to try and control coverage that you find inconvenient and force faux-centrism (see: NPR).

agumonkey 4y ago

Do you think it's always been the case ? I have a strange belief that people before the 60s, through harsher lives, were a lot more resilient and thus less interested by petty news cycles.

csharpminor 4y ago
I highly recommend reading old press clippings from your area. Reading headlines from 100 years ago personally made me feel as though not much has changed.

VonGuard 4y ago

If it bleeds, it leads.

TorontoTheGood 4y ago

You sort of get to see this in real time on Reddit, upvotes generally goes to stuff that upsets people.

amjnsx 4y ago

My theory is that people want to read about things that make themselves feel better. Bad news usually does that - in that it helps us reflect that “well at least i’m not THAT guy!”

sheepybloke 4y ago

I feel like you could break up negative stories into a lot of batches. Would you say the type of negative stories have changed? Maybe towards more outrage or drama stories instead of fear-based stories?