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News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. People are evolutionarily wired to pay more attention to bad news because bad news is theoretically useful

News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. People are evolutionarily wired to pay more attention to bad news because bad news is theoretically useful for trying to avoid or mitigate threats. Problems is, once you have a limitless firehose of news from all over the world 24/7 what you end up with is essentially a limitless supply of bad news which inundates people constantly. This causes issues, since any mild gradual improvements to the world get drowned out. The amount of actual yearly improvement needed to give the impression that things are improving ends up being dramatically more than the small incremental improvements which are normally seen.

gumby 3y ago
> News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. The paper discusses this and the ft article quotes it: > particularly if one adheres to the view that traditional media fulfills a watchdog/surveillance function. Although this argument could explain the average level of negativity in news reporting, it does not address its increasingly downward trend. … Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.