Yes

by robertsloan2

Created on: November 08, 2007

Of course the mainstream media outlets favor bad news over good news. Bad news is conflict. Conflict makes good story. Violence, disaster, bad weather, controversy all grab people's interest and often are what people think of as "news."

Good news has to be significantly dramatic to affect the ratings. When the Berlin Wall came down, a memorably powerful news event was something tremendously positive. It got as much coverage as a major earthquake or a war, because it came at the end of a long hard series of bad news articles about people trying to cross that barrier between East and West. Such conclusions are relatively rare, where you have a long dramatic series of bad events that culminate in something positive and powerful.

Unfortunately, this tendency of news readers and watchers to prefer drama leads to important news being ignored. Newspapers exist to sell papers, televised news competes with dramas and cop shows, and important things like the success of Solidarity in Poland don't carry enough punch to rate more than one fleeting story, if that.

A disturbing tendency has been growing in televised news since the middle 90s - a tendency to script news events and structure them like cop shows or adventure dramas. Not only does the news focus almost exclusively on disaster, which was pretty much a given ever since there was news, but now if there is insufficient disaster, the bad news will get stretched out into plots like crime dramas and courtroom dramas. The news will take sides in a trial and in the coverage script and structure it to look like the oversimplified script of a courtroom drama. The "bad guy" is prejudged long before the results of the trial. Someone can be acquitted for murder and the news will imply that he "got off on a technicality" even when the real evidence just proved he couldn't have done it and the technicality was that he was innocent!

The level of filler in media news is going up, but analysis has gone down to a grade school level. Even minor bad news is presented with every dramatic trick a cinematographer and scriptwriter can use to raise adrenaline and create stress. The image presented by the news is unmitigated constant disaster, an atmosphere of terror has been fostered especially since 9/11, when the slant of the news slid over to "good guys and bad guys" to a shocking degree.

To see the difference, watch televised news and then compare that with BBC World News. By and large the proportion of bad news vs. good news may be about the same, but entire major stories that don't appear in American media at all get serious coverage, and the type of coverage is different. BBC World News does not spoon feed its viewers an opinion about the news and gloss over the background of the events, it will go into some depth on why there's a riot in Indonesia or a conflict in Eastern Europe and educate the viewer. This is what news was supposed to do in the old days. American media news has forgotten that educational aspect, and it's largely forgotten there's a world out there unless a particular story relates to American corporate interests.

Compare the same stories with what you'll find on major Internet feeds, and you'll discover the best news coverage can be found online - including much more positive news if you're not someone who prefers rubbernecking at accidents.

Even at its best though, televised news will always show the worst news and the bad news over anything good or positive. This can have some effects on health. Human beings respond visually, video and moving pictures react on the immune system and unconscious the same way real events do. By watching televised news we witness a daily incidence of violence and disaster comparable to living in a combat zone - and our bodies wind up reacting to those perceived threats with high blood pressure, adrenaline surges and exhaustion, stress builds up and that makes people irritable.

I would recommend taking it in small doses and seriously consider reading newspapers, listening to the radio or reading on the Internet because any of those forms of news are likely to go into more detail on what's happening, the real news items, and are not going to artificially drive your body into combat shock at seeing too many bodies daily. It may do a lot to reduce stress just to reduce television watching in favor of other pursuits. That of course makes it easier to think clearly about events you read about, without the artificial adrenaline shocks of witnessing bad news in visceral form, as if you were there.

It may also make people more jaded about violence to see all of the country's troubles compressed into short violent sound bytes. In day to day life, how many of us routinely hear gunshots? In day to day life, do you ordinarily see bodies in the streets and hear from your neighbors about who got killed? If you do, that's one thing, I've lived in neighborhoods like that. But if you don't, then do you need to face as much stress as if you did? Do you need to live in constant fear?

Building up this level of low-grade terror day after day makes it easier to push people with propaganda into accepting losses of freedom. We should not have to live in fear of violence if we live in places that don't have a high level of violence, the people who successfully found a way to live more quietly should be able to enjoy that relative security and look at the news as information, not treat it as something that happened next door and needs an immediate response to defend self and home.

I am not recommending that people should be uninformed. Many events on the news are newsworthy and important, if you plan to travel it is vitally important to know whether there's political or social unrest in the place you mean to visit, and whether it's prone to weather disasters and in what season. Specifically, because what grabs interest in readers and viewers is drama, I am suggesting that to reduce stress it helps to take the news in slower, more thoughtful forms and actually think about world events rather than reacting from the gut with terror. That mob response causes so much of the violence in the world, but thinking and writing and reading are ways an individual can keep his or her head in tough situations.

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