Good News/Bad News

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Mike VanBuskirk

“Tornado strikes again in the South.” Weather and Sports: it’s all news we watch at some point or another. The news is an excellent source for information about things happening around you and in the world. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “news” is defined as “previously unknown information or a report of recent events.” When you watch or hear the news, have you ever noticed that there’s more negative news being aired than positive? Maybe airing negative news is good for business, but is it right? Would you rather read a story that says “Shooting Claims Life of Southside Teen” or “Allegany County School Receives $100,000 grant?” Most news channels I’ve seen report shootings and deaths first instead of “good news.”

According to Quartz News, the Russian news site City Reporter spent a day reporting only good, positive news and found the silver lining to negative news. Some news they reported for the day included “No travel disruptions despite snowfall.” To some people snow isn’t exactly a walk in the park, but this news website found a positive way to air the snowfall. The result of this positive news: a City Reporter editor’s post to Facebook said they lost nearly two thirds of their normal readership (Quartz). Quartz said it’s not a surprise, but the experiment proves our that our imagination is more drawn to negativity in the news. In a survey done at Belfast Central School, respondents were asked if they thought news stations aired more negative, positive news or in between. The graph shows the results, and only a small percentage believed the news aired was positive. Almost half thought it was negative as many described it as in-between. In the same survey, people were asked what they liked to hear on the news. The graph to the right shows that the two largest categories selected were sports and crime — sports being usually positive and of course crime being negative.

In an article written by Tom Stafford, he said that when reading news, “it can feel like the only things reported are terrible, depressing events.” Questions Stafford brings up are “Why does the media concentrate on the bad things in life, rather than the good?” and “What might this depressing slant say about us, the audience?” In an effort to explore these possibilities, researchers Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka set up an experiment at McGill University in Canada. These researchers invited students to come to Trussler and Soroka’s lab for “a study of eye tracking.” These volunteers were asked to choose stories about politics and read the articles so a camera could make some baseline eye-tracking measures. They told them that it was important that they actually read the articles so correct measurements could be taken. After this, they watched a short video: this the main purpose of the experiment as far as the subjects were concerned but was in fact just a filler task. They then answered questions about what types of political news they would like to read. The results of the experiment, as well as the stories that were read, were somewhat depressing, according to Trussler and Soroka. According to the eye tracking, participants more often chose stories with a negative tone — corruption, setbacks and hypocrisy. When asked, they said they preferred good news, despite what the results showed.

So, when it comes to news stories, a majority of them included some type of negativity. Research done on this revealed when there’s negative news, people watched, read or listened, but a day with nothing but rainbows and lollipops dropped ratings. In my personal opinion, I think people find the negative news appealing.