When Will We See Positive News Reported?

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07 Jan 2023, 2:08 pm

Maybe there us nothing but doom and gloom because there *is* nothing but doom and gloom. And anything "good" is not going to turn the world back around. Rescuing a dog trapped on an ice floe is wholesome and all, but it's not going to save the world. And for all we know they might have put the dog there on purpose and recorded themselves "rescuing" the animal.

One time in the early 2000s I had to go to the hospital for a psychiatric appointment in outpatient mental health. I was suffering really bad anxiety because of the SARS outbreak. And then I see in the waiting room that all the magazines are screaming about SARS on nearly every cover and I lose it. If it's not SARS, it's 9/11 and terrorism. I freak out and say I don't want to see all this scary and depressing garbage in magazines. The receptionist then tells me the reason there's nothing but scary and depressing stuff in the magazines is because there's nothing BUT scary and depressing things in the world.

Well, at least now I don't see such magazines whenever I go to the hospital now. I don't see any because of Covid. Which is a form of the SARS virus, go figure. Even if they had less depressing magazines, how do I know the last person who picked up one to read didn't have covid or monkey pox or norovirus or influenza? How do I know if the last person who sat in the chair I'm sitting in now didn't have them and they didn't even bother to disinfect the seat, even though it's a hospital.

The world is ending, but it's not ending fast enough

lostonearth35
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07 Jan 2023, 2:11 pm

hurtloam wrote:

The problem is that problems sell. There's lots of good things happening, but the sensationalist bad news is what you see on the front page. Yeah, it can get us down.

When bad things happen remember Mr Rogers said: look for the helpers. You will always see people who are helping.

Here's a link to a site that tries to find good stories to spread

Upworthy

Well those helpers obviously aren't doing a good enough job helping if the world has become the dumpster fire that it is. And all you ever hear is how the "helpers" are overworked, underpaid, and just don't care anymore.

Sonic200
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07 Jan 2023, 2:34 pm

We will never see pigs fly or positive news reported.

FleaOfTheChill
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07 Jan 2023, 7:53 pm

hurtloam wrote:

The problem is that problems sell. There's lots of good things happening, but the sensationalist bad news is what you see on the front page.

^ that.

I didn't read everything in this thread. I just saw that post and thought, yup. That's about it to.

Good news is out there but it's not making front headlines and getting plastered in our faces because it doesn't 'sell' as well. I'm not big into the news like a lot of people are, so I can't rattle off good news stories from today or anything, but most recently, I recall reading a bunch of inspirational type stories about people during the massive cold front/storm that blew across the states around xmas. Those stories put a smile on my head. Sometimes I get to feeling down about humanity in general but stories like the ones I read that week help keep my faith in humanity from completely vanishing. There is good news out there, you just have to look to find it and dismiss all the rest of the crazy crap out there.

kitesandtrainsandcats
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07 Jan 2023, 8:45 pm

A reference;

Why does so much news seem negative? Human attention may be to blame

By Amina Khan Staff Writer
Sept. 5, 2019 1:35 PM PT

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2 ... ative-news

Quote:

Ever wonder why there’s so much bad news out there? Maybe it’s because people find bad news more interesting than good news.

A new study involving more than 1,000 people across 17 countries spanning every continent but Antarctica concludes that, on average, people pay more attention to negative news than to positive news.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint that this human bias toward negative news might be a large part of what drives negative news coverage. But the results also revealed that this negative bias was not shared by everyone, and some even had a positive bias — a sign that there may be a market for positive news.

“In a period during which news around the world is especially wrought with negativity, this subject is of obvious significance,” the study authors wrote.

Lead author Stuart Soroka, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said he and his colleagues were interested in the psychology of negativity biases — the tendency for people to pay more attention to negative information than positive information — and the role it might play in shaping the news.

...

Quote:

However, the scientists also found that on an individual level, there seems to be a high level of variability in responses. Roughly 2 out of 5 participants showed either no bias toward negative news or a bias toward positive news.

This means that the old adage “If it bleeds, it leads” may no longer always apply, said Richard Lau, a political psychologist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study.

“One of the things that the study is flagging is that there’s a great deal of variability within people,” Lau said. “This is true across all cultures.”

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kitesandtrainsandcats
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07 Jan 2023, 8:48 pm

One more reference:

Negativity bias: Why we love bad news (and how to break our addiction to it)

Posted: October 23, 2018 By: Jory MacKay

https://blog.rescuetime.com/negativity- ... -bad-news/

Quote:

Next, is the problem with consuming bad news itself. According to data scientist Kalev Leetaru—who used a technique called “sentiment mining” to assess the emotional tone of articles published in the New York Times from 1945 to 2005, as well as an archive of translated articles from 130 other countries—the news has gotten progressively gloomier since the 1970s.

As psychologist Steven Pinker explains in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, this is because the news cycle has become “like play-by-play sports commentary.” To stay competitive, news agencies focus on “discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition” rather than larger changes.

“Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.

“The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every 50 years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.”

All that time steeped in negativity has its consequences.

Far from being better informed, heavy news consumers end up miscalibrated and irrational due to a cognitive bias called the Availability Heuristic. This bias explains that people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.

It’s why people rank tornadoes (which kill around 50 people a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills closer to 4,000).

To combat the negative news cycle, slow down and pick your battles

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07 Jan 2023, 11:38 pm

When there's no more government left in the world.

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15 Jan 2023, 7:07 am

Here's some good news

Quote:

A UN report has found the Earth’s ozone layer is on course to be healed within the next 40 years. What was once humanity’s most feared environmental peril is now an example of how the world can take collective action.

How did we save the ozone layer

Fnord
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