Why the Media Covers Bad News
Here’s a cogent interview with a journalist who explores why there is so little good news in today’s media; everything’s bad today, and it will be even worse tomorrow. He notes that this is the precise opposite of the way we raise our children: we encourage, we celebrate success, we describe the world as a nice place to live.
The subject of the interview says that this is because most of his fellows don’t consider it their job to make the world a better place. That’s for sure. But they don’t consider it their jobs to make our lives worse, either. They simply need to create stories that attract attention, and, as the gentleman points out, “good news is no news” (a clever play on “no news is good news” ).
Even 100 years ago, long before six corporations controlled over 90% of the information we receive, most news stories covered horrible events. In the 1850s, H.D. Thoreau said, “I need to know that house fires can and do occur; I do not need to hear about every single one of them.”
Yet there is another, even more important, vector here altogether that needs to be mentioned. Almost all of the bad things that are happening in our civilization have causes, and those causes are nearly all human evil. Why are we taking such abominably poor care of our environment? Why are hate crimes in America on the rise? Why has our response to the coronavirus been so late in coming, and so feeble? Why are we still making the bombs that have left so many Yemeni children to starve to death, and supporting Israel in its genocide of the Palestinians?
The answer is some combination of greed, cruelty, corruption, lies, and other despicable acts of the world’s most powerful people. Covering these stories may not be good news, but it’s sure better than pretending these things aren’t happening, thus letting the perpetrators continue unchecked.
For a great while, the media was very kind to Hitler and Mussolini. What would have happened in 1925, when the latter had declared himself “leader for life” and butchered anyone who took issue with that, had world media exposed this for what it was? We’ll never know, of course, but exposing evil is a large part of the job we count on the media to perform. Above everything else, we need the truth.
