Everyday we see it either on TV or in the Newspaper…
Somebody got Robbed…
Somebody got Raped…
Sombody got shot to Death…
Some company just laid off 10,000 workers…
Each day the horror stories go on and on and on. How come they hardly ever seem to report anything good or positive? Things like…
Some company just created 10,000 new jobs in the city…
The FDA just found a way to lower drug costs for everyone…
Some Millionare just donated a Million dollars to some local College University…
Some Harvard Scientist just discovered a cure for HIV…
I don’t know about you guys, but I really get tired of hearing the same “Gloom and Doom” they bring to us each day. It seem like if someone does something good, you hardly hear a whisper about it. Someone does something bad…you almost NEVER hear the end of it. Has our society become so bloodthirsty that we cannot live from day to day without hearing these grusome tales the Media brings to us each day?
I often wonder…if the Media brought us only positive stories every day instead of the filth we see on a daily basis…how would it our society as a whole?
Because Sensationalism sells soap, or at least it sells whatever the sponsor is peddling.
Brcause that is what TV news is all about-- selling ad time at the most profitable possible rate. Truth is secondary to peddling Beef Jerky or Funions.
Same with newspapers & magazines.
Ad revenue is the source of the do-rei-me. The price on the cover is there to carry the costs.
For the same reason the fire department only ever visits when your house is on fire.
I often wonder..if the Media brought us only positive stories every day instead of the filth we see on a daily basis...how would it our society as a whole?
We would be stupid and unaware of the dangers of the world, and thus we would all probibly die of things that could have been avoided. I’d much rather read about crime and death then have to repeat it.
The media report what is judged as newsworthy. Some crime is newsworthy. That gets printed. A lot of good news is newsworthy. That gets printed as well.
Per your example, if a company created 10,000 jobs in a city, you bet that’s going to get reported in the local media, are you kidding? How big the play is depends on how much this affects the community, how big your city is, etc…
Lower drug costs? Yep, also would be reported.
Millionaire donating money? Buried story, but probably in there. Not that newsworthy unless it’s a local college on the verge of shutting down, or something like that.
Cure for HIV? Front page, HUGE headline. Seriously, that’d be like the biggest story of the century so far.
Some news outlets — usually second- and third-tier TV news departments, trying to make a splash and catch up with the leading station — have experimented with a “positive” approach, downplaying the crime and blood in favor of human interest and factual-type stories. They have gotten buried in the ratings. As other posters have said before, news outlets focus on the negative because that’s what we, the viewing and reading public, want.
Now, understanding that takes you out of the reasonably well-understood world of market economics, and into a highly debatable gray area somewhere between psychology and philosophy. Why do we obsess about the negative?
I have a theory about this, which includes a component similar to what TitoBenito said, but as this is GQ, I won’t make any assertions. The factual answer is as given: News outlets offer gloom and doom because it sells better than the alternative.
Awww Bosda! I sing that song all the time when I’m wishing the world wasn’t quite such a crappy place. Someone was stabbed to death last week two blocks from my house.
Others have answered the OP – bad news sells, and those news outlets that have tried the good news approach have found that no one watches. That said, there is a difference in the focus of the various news agencies. I find that the local news in the San Francisco Bay Area tends to be much more positive and upbeat than the local news elsewhere (Boston or Washington, D.C., for example). Our news usually starts with murder and mayhem, but then moves on to generous millionaires and job creation. Maybe we’re just more optimistic here in NoCal.
Chicago dopers may remember the noble experiment of WBBM TV a few years back. Stuck in 3rd or 4th place, they completely reformatted their newscast to focus on “important” stories – city politics, education and other vital issues, and made the reports longer, to give a fuller explanation of both sides.
The ratings sank like a stone.
What does The News Hour get in the ratings? Maybe a 1 or 2 rating – much lower than even the declining ratings of the network evening shows.
When the audience decides they want a better product, the news organizations will be happy to provide it.
i think a fair answer to this question requires separating tv news and daily newspapers. tv news maintains a “if it bleeds it leads” philosophy in part to be competitive with the other stations who do the same thing, but also because it’s easy and cheap. you don’t have to hire experts to analyze complex social issues or seek out opposing viewpoints. you just read the police report and send a camera crew to the crime scene. you also have to recognize that a half-hour local news broadcast has maybe 22 minutes, often less, of actual content (minus commercials), and of that a big part is sports, weather and usually some “feel good” feature. there might be 10 minutes or less of actual news coverage. you can’t say much about anything in 10 minutes.
by contrast, the daily newspaper in any city covers local politics, business, school board meetings, high school sports etc. because those are the things people buy newspapers to read about. to compare tv and newspapers, imagine how long it would take to read aloud the entire editorial content, front to back, of any daily newspaper.
but answering this question also requires talking about a definition of news, and most people would at least say that news is something that is unusual or unexpected. often that is crime or tragedy. for most people most of their days are relatively uneventful. hundreds of thousands of people drive on Interstate 95 every day. they go to work, they go home, everything’s fine. but when an oil tanker crashes and burns or a tractor trailer overturns, it’s news, in large part because it is unusual, unexpected, out of the ordinary. it also has a direct impact on the thousands of people driving on the highway that day. do you think that it shouldn’t be covered? if someone gets murdered or carjacked, that’s unusual, and newsworthy–it’s not something that happens to most people. one continuing criticism of the mass media is that it DOESN’T cover murders in low-income neighborhoods as thoroughly as in other parts of town. the truth is that it’s not unusual when drug dealers kill each other, meaning not very newsworthy, but it is unusual for, say, a doctor pulling into his driveway in a “safe” neighborhood to be carjacked. that makes it news, right or wrong.
what do you think the media should cover instead of what they do now? and how much of your time would you be willing to spend to see or read? do you now watch “60 minutes” and “nightline” and “macneil-lehrer report,” all of which are known for in-depth reporting on complex issues? do you read the “new york times” every day? do you subscribe to the news magazines and the political commentary magazines? and if your next door neighbor was murdered in his house, and the killer was still on the loose, what would you think of media organizations who ignored that crime to report “good” news?
Michael Moore’s documentary, Bowling for Columbine, has a good chunk o’ time devoted to the trend of “scare reporting” by the media. Definitely worth watching; I convinced myself to take shocking news with a grain of salt because of it.
You know the trend has gone overboard when the 11 o’clock news is touting their special investigative report, Escalators of Doom!
Ex-newspaperman here:
The comments of Reader99, Cervaise, and kunilou are accurate. When I was the star reporter (READ: the only halfway-competent reporter) of a small Indiana daily, I made a deliberate decision to focus more on political, economic, and agricultural news and feature stories than on crime stories.
My motives were fourfold:
1.) Our biggest rival was based in the county seat, where the courthouse was only two minutes away, and had an excellent reporter who devoted 90 percent of his professional effort to crime and court stories, while I had a publisher who always griped about me wanting to leave early to cover some trial.
2.) I had an epiphany, based on a conservation with a convicted rapist and murderer, that some, if not a majority, of thugs actually enjoy the notoriety they get. I had no desire to give some worthless shit a feeling of being important simply by devoting half a front page to him (or her). The basic facts should be printed, yes, but there seemed to be no reason to wallow in sensationalism.
3.) Advances in science and medicine and developments in commerce and agriculture are, in the long run, one hell of a lot more important than simple skullduggery and bloodshed.
4.) I had begun to get a bit sickened and burned out by carnage. Just for the helluva of it, I once calculated, off the top of my head, that I had reported on 35-40 murders in the course of my career, including one where I was friends with the perpetuator and knew two of the victims, another where I was romantically involved with an important witness (of course, things like this are not supposed to happen and I suppose they don’t to the big boys. Live in a small town for a while as a reporter, though, and you know damn near everybody.), and a third being that of Orville Lynn Majors, who may be the worst serial killer in Indiana history. The real figure may be higher as I did not check my clippings or any morgues, nor did I include rapes, attempted murders, industrial accidents, fatal automobile accidents, and suicides.
I never had anybody compliment me on trying to focus on different news items. I did have the second-in-command of our city’s police force direct my attention to a story in the rival newspaper, a story about some kid busted for alcohol and drugs under unusual circumstances, and ask: “Why don’t you guys print stories like that?” Newspapers print stories about crime, especially murder, because it accomplishes the chief corporate goal of newspapers: make money.
Starguard, I could write a brilliant 2,000-word piece about the pros and cons of a school board’s new proposal for improving test scores – nuanced, well-written, scrupulously fair to both sides, and well-researched – and turn out a slapdash piece about some drunken lout accursed of banging a 15-year-old girl. I give you only one guess as to which the majority of readers will lap up and talk about.
A few specific comments on your remarks:
A thing that has been overlooked here is that some crime stories are so unbelievably weird (hey, I could tell you about the guy who broke into a neighbor’s house numerous times over an eight-year period just to get beer & poker money. And his neighbor never reported the break-ins to the police until the burglar was caught red-handed.) or tragic (the case of the perp I knew) that they are as compelling as just about any fiction ever written. If you don’t think this is true, and you have access to a good repository or database of Indiana newspapers, I suggest you look up the murder of Richard Whitehead in the spring of 1995.
They may not make for pleasant reading, but these are important stories. Losing a plant with 100-200 well-paid jobs can be catastrophic to a small town.
Newspapers routinely cover these. I wrote probably dozens of stories about new companies coming to town, businesses that were thinking of coming to town, or serious economic initiatives.
This would be reported, as would a cure for HIV. Look at all the coverage Bush’s plan to help seniors with prescription drugs got.
I have reported stories about a woman who gave a local church a couple of hundred grand and a man who donated the money to help a small town build a new firehouse/city hall. We always loved to do these kind of stories. However, not all donors wish to make their gifts public knowledge, nor do all people wish to make their good deeds known to the public.
Former 10 year veteran of the TV News business here.
I was a producer for many years. I was the one who chose what went into the newscast and in what order. I have worked in larger markets and smaller ones. I mention this because the type of news you get on local TV very much depends on the size of the TV market you are in. In a smaller market (150,000 households or less) a single murder is big news, worthy of a lead. It will probably have a reporter attached to the story and may even be a live shot. In a larger market, such as any city with a major league sports franchise, a single murder might not even get a mention. I talked with someone who worked in the Kansas City area a few year ago and he said that his station usually would not do drug-related or black-on-black murders because they were so common. This is the same reasoning that leads to fender-benders not being reported. As to the important stories that affect everyones lives…not enough people are capable of or willing to make the intellectual committment to care. This means low ratings. And to those who are muttering “You should make them care” right about now…the level of knowledge to understand complicated stories requires a long term committment to learn about the world around you. Many people are not willing to do that. They are more comfortable watching hillbillies throw chairs at each other on the Jerry Springer show.
