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

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