Let’s say one day you’re scrolling on social media and come across a video captioned, “Cat Shelter Saved from Shutdown!”. The video afterward is captioned, “Breaking News! Government official Crosses the Line!”. Which one do you suppose your eye will be more drawn to? Whether we want to admit it or not, negative titles are more eye-catching than positive ones.
This is all to do with human cognition; according to the Harvard School of Public Health, “Negative stimuli tend to draw our attention, and people tend to weigh the negative more heavily than the positive when making decisions.”
Even just in general, people feel it’s riskier to avoid bad news than good news. It’s a survival response to feel a need to constantly be informed about world issues, that way you can be prepared if that issue comes to affect you.
Stories that cater to our fears and dismays get more attention. This is a completely normal fact, one that no one can deny. The issue is that media outlets use this fact to exploit viewers by fear-mongering. They observe certain issues in the world and in society that are concerning people the most, and push out stories that add fuel to the flame.
Naturally, the traction these stories receive is overwhelming. Especially with the way algorithms work on social media. Meaning, if you engage with even just one video of a certain type of content, an excess of other videos of that same content type will be filtered into what you see. If you continue to engage with this type of media, it is all you will see.
For example, if you interact with a news video retaining negativity, other negative news videos will begin to pour into your feed for your page. Especially since most social media is short-form content, it makes it much too easy to spend hours at a time scrolling.
Lots of people don’t even realize they’ll spend hours scrolling, because the shortness of the content doesn’t require much focus. This leads to many people falling into rabbit holes of negative news stories that hold pessimistic perspectives. Subconsciously, people form their own pessimistic perspectives as well.
This is terribly damaging to people’s mental health. If all you see is everything wrong in the world, you won’t realize how much good in the world still exists. This negative psychological impact is known as “doomsday thinking”, and it is more prominent in the world than ever.
Another aspect of this issue is that more often than not, media outlets will create biased or untrue news to feed into people’s appetite for bad news. Stories will be twisted from normal and realistic to cynical and inaccurate.
An example of this occurred in 2024, when the New York Times was scrutinized for showing gender-affirming care for young people in a negative light. Rather than covering some of the benefits of these medical procedures, they only showed negative angles that cast doubt about the procedures’ safety and validity.
It goes to show how news outlets aren’t afraid to fabricate stories as they desire, and a lot of the time, it goes unnoticed. The bleak narratives being released onto the media are only meant to get clicks, not to be entirely legitimate.
This is a major problem with modern-day media; journalists are less concerned with having integrity and more focused on getting more buzz from the public, with no concern for the negative mental impact it has on society.
Times are already hard on a lot of people; the negativity from the media certainly doesn’t help with that. Society needs more good news, not to replace bad news, but to balance it out.
Although bad news is very compelling, news outlets don’t realize that, eventually, people get tired of constantly being exposed to it. People don’t want to constantly live in fear, in worry, in sadness.
People have even gone so far as to create a trend called “hopecore”, which compiles clips of upbeat moments that give hope to humanity. These hopecore compilations are extremely popular, with thousands to millions of views.
The utmost desire for all humans is to be happy and live a joyful life. If the media won’t give people stories of joyful lives and experiences, people will turn to themselves to produce them. So, really, the media’s plan will backfire.
Don’t get me wrong, staying informed with current events is important, but getting overloaded with them has the opposite effect.