Last week I was lying in my sickbed recovering from a painful allergic reaction and, as you do, I let my mind wander. It began to ponder a question that has preoccupied me ever since: Why is there so little good news?
It seems the world is filled with the bad and the ugly and precious little of the good stuff. At least that is the impression I get from my daily diet of news.
I looked back over the lead stories of New Zealand’s five metropolitan dailies for the past month. Of the 130 stories I counted, 98 had a negative tone. Only 16 were positive and the remainder were neither one thing nor the other.
I have been tracking these newspapers’ lead stories since 2020 and there is an almost unrelenting sense of gloom, and sometimes doom, although I admit the Covid pandemic accounted for some of that negativity. It did a couple of years ago, but not now.
My introduction to the day’s news yesterday via the country’s news websites was a smorgasbord of gloom and copycat gloom at that – the same topics repeated across outlets. It didn’t improve into the afternoon when there was blanket coverage of the return of the three strikes law for repeat offenders.
Mind you, our overseas counterparts weren’t any better. The Sydney Morning Herald gave me “Eighteen minutes of terror” as it retraced the movements of the Bondi Junction mall killer. The New York Times pondered the “mountain of evidence” against Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal took me inside the “White House scramble” to avert a Middle East War. The Daily Mail said Tories were accusing Labour of “appearing to hate Britain” and the BBC and Deutsche Welle both told me Netanyahu vowed to reject sanctions against an army unit for human rights violations. Only The Guardian had a glimmer of good news over military aid for Ukraine (good news, that is, if you’re not Russian).
Why are journalists so drawn to bad news?
Now. before you say they are just giving the people what they want, you need to be aware that negative news is driving people away. Don’t take my word for it. A large international research study led by Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen last year found that negativity and anxiety were primary factors in news avoidance. Combine that with Auckland University of Technology’s 2024 JM&D study of trust in news, which found three-quarters of us actively avoid the news to some degree, with many citing “negative and depressing” content as a prime driver. We can’t simply say news outlets are serving a public demand.
Nor can we be entirely comfortable with the notion that journalists should not shield people from the realities of this harsh world of ours, and are simply “telling it like it is”.
Social theorist Alain de Botton (author of the bestseller Status Anxiety) wrote a thought-provoking little book called The News: A User’s Manual. In it he says the notion of media presenting reality isn’t entirely true because “at any point in time there is a welter of conflicting evidence about what is going on in the land”.
The news may present itself as the authoritative portraitist of reality. It may claim to have an answer to the impossible question of what has really been going on, but it has no overarching ability to transcribe reality. It merely selectively fashions reality through the choices it makes about what stories to cast its spotlight on and which ones to leave out.
He rightly sees enormous power in this news selection process and eloquently interprets how that power manifests itself.
Herein rests an enormous and largely uncomprehended power: the power to assemble the picture that citizens end up having of one another; the power to dictate what our idea of ‘other people’ will be like; the power to invent a nation in our imaginations.
No one responsible for putting out a news bulletin or edition takes that responsibility lightly. I know I didn’t and nor did any of my colleagues. So, what colours the judgement of those making those decisions today?
There was a time when I would have said it is driven by learned behaviour fashioned around a set of values that are passed down rather like folklore. There have been attempts by academics to codify them, notably from 1965 when Galtung & Ruge published Structuring and Selecting News. That was the year I started my career in journalism but few journalists in my first newsroom would have read it. News values were something you learned almost by osmosis.
Today, newsrooms have instant analytics on what stories are ‘trending’ on their websites and no doubt over time this builds the picture of what they believe their audiences want. However, the news avoidance studies might suggest this is a flawed assumption. It is simply telling newsrooms what the remaining audience might like.
However, even that audience is, in fact, consuming what it is offered and the hierarchical nature of news websites and apps means they start at the top and work their way down until they get fed up or run out of puff. I don’t know about you, but I have never made it all the way to the bottom of a news website without some energetic scrolling.
Lying in my sickbed – and feeling a bit sorry for myself – I wondered whether there was a second factor in news selection that turns the Bing Crosby song on its head. I’m talking, of course, about Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive, E-lim-inate the Negative. Rather than take the crooner’s advice, they ac-cent-tchu-ate the negative. And even Mr In-Between does not get much of a look-in.
Is the current approach simply pandering to a marketing ploy – the pull of information that might trigger a strong emotional response? Anything that might represent a threat falls into that category. Crime stories, for example, elicit such an emotional response even when the threat to our own safety is remote. We are unlikely to be confronted by an axe-wielding psychopath, but our emotional hard wiring sees him as a potential threat.
However, I think what we are witnessing is not simply a cynical manipulation of people’s emotions. Rather, I begin to wonder whether it is due to the emotional state of journalists themselves. Has the state of the industry – and the alarming level of insecurity that has flowed from it – created a collective sense of doom that is colouring judgement?
Is it possible that a dystopic view of their own futures is flowing through to the worldview they present to their audiences? Of course, it would not be deliberate or, perhaps, even conscious.
Or does their exposure to various forms of social media lead them to think that society has an inherently negative view of the present and future? Are they simply mirroring a wider social malaise? Could it be that as our population grows, it becomes less tolerant, more aggressive, and unhappy?
I can’t give definitive answers to those questions, but I do know that I feel very different when I consume their content compared to my experience when reading of the content of some digital start-ups that present their targeted audiences with a more positive outlook .
I looked at The Spinoff. It started by telling me what was new in the digital streaming environment and then reviewed Taylor Swift’s new album. It had a nostalgic look at reality TV before telling me, oh by the way, “Government risks an own goal in cutting funding for Growing Up in New Zealand”. The latter was a considered analysis by academic Max Rashbrooke on the consequences of a funding cut to one of the country’s leading research projects – the tracking of 6000 New Zealanders from birth which began in 2009. The Spinoff did not in any way minimise the story, but did place it within the context of the audience’s wider interests.
Similarly, Newsroom leavened its homepage (which led with a slowdown in freight movements) with positive stories about our future in Southeast Asia and the achievements of kuia Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku.
There are lessons for our mainstream media in both the reasons for news avoidance and the approach taken by the newer members of their industry. Or they could simply look at their own families and close community. Do they see a constant flood of doom and gloom? Of course not. Every family, every community, every country is a dynamic mix of good and bad, happy and sad, light and shade. That is what the daily news offering should present and represent.
I have a message for all of them: Haul out that old recording you have of Morecambe and Wise and bring me sunshine. I’m sure it will make me feel better.
Very insightful Gavin
Thanks John. Appreciated.