News Always Bad, Is That Good?

I don't know about you, but for me most of the news I see is about unpleasant things. Be it acts of social injustice, war crimes, natural disasters, or petty theft the 24 hour news stream is constantly filled with negative events. Then why does this incredibly negative news stream, actually shine a ray of light in the world. To answer that question we first have to look into why news organizations choose to put, what they put, in their news. While the purpose of news is to inform the general public about events, increasingly news has become more entwined with entertainment, and keeping the watcher, listener, or readers attention. What this means is that news creators need to make pieces that are both surprising, and interesting to the normal viewer. Now if the majority of the news seems to have a negative connotation, that means that negative, or bad things, are surprising, and intriguing to the majority of humans. This can be seen be seen in the vice versa as well, because comparatively smaller negative actions, get more press than their positive counterpart, which means their positive counterpart is not as surprising, or interesting to people, and is instead something that people just expect.

A real life example of this would be one person who has been abusing dogs for years often gets a piece done on them, but the person who has been volunteering weekly at an animal shelter, for the same amount of time rarely gets a piece about them. Both these acts are similar in their distance from point zero of societies moral scale, doing nothing, with one being on the end in which society deems the action wrong, and the other on the end of what society deems a good action. This means that within society, people on average are more like the volunteering at an animal shelter person, then the animal abusing person, because the abusing person is more of a surprise, and therefore more intriguing to the average viewer. So while the majority of news can be unpleasant, at least in my mind, this just means that humanity is conditioned, and expects kindness, based off the fact that kind actions are not surprising, but instead are the status quo of the world. So while you see all of the negative events being depicted by different new sources, just know that for each bad thing happening, there are so many more good actions occurring within the world. Thanks for reading, and I wish you the most marvelous of days.