Why The News Doesn't Optimize For Progress

Have you ever scrolled through your feed on IG, read, “U.S. Debt Reaches All-time High”, “San Francisco Drug Epidemic Taking Over City” or “Peruvian Earthquake Wipes Out 300 Homes in an Hour”, and felt like the world is falling apart? Or you start your daily podcast, listen through the big “updates” of the day, and finish feeling that, at this rate, there is no way we will make it to next year? 

We live in a world filled with advancements in science, healthcare, business, and technology. Creators and entrepreneurs around the globe are constantly finding new ways to solve old problems, tackle new ones, and change the global landscape for the better. Yet, I feel like this news never makes the headlines. Often, stories of progress, hope, and change are relegated to the sidelines for stories of loss, heartbreak, and fear. 

To convince myself I was not the only one who felt this way, I did some research. Surprisingly, I found that 7 in 10 Americans suffer from negative news fatigue. Diving deeper, I wanted to better understand why this was the case. 

By reading a plethora of research articles and talking with friends about this issue, I came to some important conclusions.

While I believe there are a wide number of potential reasons that our news channels, outlets, and apps appear to have a negative bias, I’ll highlight the three I found most convincing. 

The Bottom Line

Put bluntly, bad news pays. According to the Washington Post, negative headlines have more than a 60% higher click-through rate than positive ones. When media outlets are able to generate greater engagement with audiences, advertisers and marketers take notice. 

Greater engagement rates give businesses the perfect springboard to plug their content and move engaged readers into engaged customers. By selling article ad spaces, news outlets can generate higher and higher revenues on their online stories. The more we click, the more monetized stories are published, and the cycle continues to repeat itself.

When media outlets optimize purely for engagement (and ultimately their bottom line), readers are being fed content that hurts more than it helps.

The Attention Economy

With so many different websites, brands, companies, and writers competing for a single person’s attention, stories on the internet can get pretty crazy. Consequently, the more outrageous the story, the more people are intrigued. 

Let’s play a game. I am going to give you 5 headlines. You guess how many are fake. Here we go: 

“Two Elderly Men Sneak Out Of Nursing Home To Attend Heavy Metal Festival”

“Who Let The Goats Out? Runaway Herd Invades Idaho Neighborhood”

“Hawaiian Monk Seal Gets Eel Stuck Up Its Nose”

“Insomnia Leads Woman To Her Second Lottery Jackpot”

“Banksy Painting Self-Destructs Immediately After Being Sold For $1.4 Million”

If you guessed anything but 0, you are incorrect (sorry not sorry). The headlines we see may seem fantastical or downright ridiculous, but that is the whole point of the larger game the attention economy competes in.

News conglomerates repeatedly put out jaw-dropping headlines and articles so that you will click, and it works. Unfortunately, a large proportion of the content we see online uses this same persuasive strategy accompanied by negative news. While one may argue that these headlines can be deceiving, the real problem to me is when these headlines cause unnecessary fear, anger, and negativity. It seems that every conversation we hear online or on TV is focused on fringe events and extremes. 

Even the conversations we have in our daily lives are often hyperbolized and increasingly dramatic. It should be no surprise then to hear that 39% percent of U.S. citizens believe that we are living in the end times. 

When the news we consume focuses more on getting our attention than telling stories that inspire and inform, we too only exaggerate our internal thoughts and feelings for the worse.

Negativity Bias

Drawing readers in through outlandish headlines can be effective, but what really attracts readers may inherently be our own human desire for bad news. 

Countless studies have suggested that humans react more strongly to negative news, recall insults better than praise, and remember traumatic news better than positive ones. Unfortunately, many news outlets today may be unknowingly (or unfortunately knowingly) leveraging these human characteristics. As the late media genius, William Randolph Hearst, famously stated, “If it bleeds it leads”. While focusing on bad news and negativity may be an effective marketing strategy to draw an audience, it is not doing readers any psychological favors. 

Collegiate Woes

Like many other college students craving to “help make the world a better place” and learn more about the world and how “things really were”, I started to do some digging. Yet, when I would hop on Instagram or TikTok looking for encouragement, progress, and inspiration, I saw stories of loss and suffering disproportionately higher than stories focused on the good. Despite being my outlet to stay informed and remain connected with my friends and family, I couldn’t take the negative news that I felt was sucking the life out of me. Fed up, I decided to completely disconnect myself from social media and the news altogether, permanently deleting all of my accounts. My desire to learn about the world ultimately led me to completely disconnect myself because I was so discouraged by everything I was seeing online. 

For my last half of college, I felt liberated, free from the shackles of negative news once and for all…until I realized I had no idea what was going on around me. After graduating college this past May, staying connected to friends, and informed on what is happening in the U.S. and around the world was much more difficult. You see, as much as I would like to say that life was “better” without social media, clickbaity YouTube videos, and a bombardment of negative news stories, I was really just living in ignorance. 

By absolving myself of all that was bad in the world, I was also missing out on all the good. Sure, I may have felt dismayed after scrolling through my feed, but at least I saw some things that made me laugh, gave me a unique perspective, or taught me something new. Despite life being easier without bad news, it was also less rich.

While I have yet to hop back on Instagram or TikTok, I have tried to stay informed through various newsletters and podcasts. Yet, I am still running into the same problems of negativity and pessimism dominating the coverage. 

So, that brings us to the underlying question: why am I writing this? Well frankly, I was tired of feeling like sh*t every time I stepped out of my bubble to see what was happening in the world. I wanted to write about topics that I believe are important, focusing not on the things that may be bad right now, but instead on how our world is getting better. You can still acknowledge that there are issues around the U.S. and the world while focusing on the progress being made to solve them. 

 I wonder how our discussions in class, at happy hour, or at family dinners would be if we all had a bias for progress instead of everything that isn’t right in the world.  

If we don’t, why bother trying to make things better anyway? 

-John Henry

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