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I studied journalism in college and worked briefly in field. Love it. Those are my people. I will always subscribe to a bunch of stuff and give the journalists empathy.

That being said, the three times I've been close to an event that received sustained media coverage all featured wild narrative/crusader bias that caused any reader to completely miss what really happened. In each instance, evil intentions and a dark competence were implied for circumstances that were mostly just due to complexity and incompetence.

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Psh! It’s not OURRrrrr fault! We’re the ones in here paying for the fact-based, in-depth, relatively outrage-free takes! At least that’s why I’m here.

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People like bad news because it makes them feel superior to either the stupid/racist/woke people in the story, or superior to people unwilling to read bad news and who they imagine prefer to live in a privileged world of blissful ignorance. (She wrote superior-ly.)

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One thing I would recommend is, where it's still possible, to consume sources via RSS. This dynamic doesn't just select for negativity, but also for controversy – so when I read Vox via RSS, yes they publish some things I find ridiculous, but they also publish multiple sides of a lot of issues and cover a lot of things I didn't know! But whenever I get there via social media, it's either because something's hit a nerve in the woke culture war, written some scientific absurdity, or both.

Obviously RSS readers aren't numerous enough to change the dynamic – honestly we're barely enough to keep RSS reader apps in existence – but I find it's way better to see everything a publication writes than to rely on other users to filter it for you.

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OK I buy this argument, although I personally hate negative spin and “here’s this horrible thing you can’t do anything about” stories. How do we make this better? Does substackification make it better or worse?

That is pretty much how I have dealt with it, by happenstance rather than by design. For the past ~5 years I have dramatically reduced my consumption of news, and that has had life-enhancing consequences. When something big happens and I have to venture back in, I’m generally appalled. Maybe it’s just impossible to consume general news now and each of us has to build our own edifice. That doesn’t seem like a positive development.

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For anyone over 40, gloom about the future is quite justified. Within 20 years my libido will crater. Within 20 years of that, my posture will droop and my brain will falter. Within 10 years of that, I will be dead.

I can stave off all this awfulness through diet and exercise. If I’m really determined, I might grow stronger and wiser for several more years. However, that only increases the chance I’ll be senescent long before I’m dead. It increases the chance I’ll outlive my ability to work and will be borderline poor unless I save and inherit enough not to be.

People project objectively valid individual fears onto society as a whole. As society gets older and more people are past their prime, this dynamic becomes more powerful. Young people can at least hope the future will get better as they become stronger, richer, more knowledgeable and more capable. Middle age people can tread water if they are disciplined. Old people bitch about kids these days because they themselves are withering but don’t want to stare oblivion in the face.

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Great post.

So today I open my Los Angeles Times and read a prominently featured story that informs me that in Napa County, an elderly woman with underlying health problems got the vaccine, but then contracted COVID and a month later died (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-07/napa-county-records-first-fully-vacinated-person-covid-death)

I'm trying to imagine the editor mulling this over and deciding that this was newsworthy -- although I suspect there was precious little mulling. My guess is, as Matt says, the editor decided that this was the kind of story the readers thirst for and if he or she decided to kill it then that would be a pollyanish hiding the truth from the reading public.

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I think it is important to note that at an individual level paying more attention to bad news (to "news" because "no news is good news") and wanting to share it is was personally useful and evolutionarily adaptive. In most situations there was a clear and correct "policy conclusion to drawn from bad news -- run, get ready to fight, build up food reserves.

That is a lot less true today. Our craving for bad news like for sweet-salty-fatty foods is a holdover from a much more hostile environment.

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old joke about how bad news can cheer you up:

Two Jews are sitting on a park bench, one of the few permitted to them in Nazi Germany. One is reading the Berliner Gemeindeblatt, the Jewish communal newspaper, the other is halfway through the virulently antisemitic Der Stürmer.

“Why on earth are you reading that Nazi rubbish?” the Gemeindeblatt reader asks. “It’s simple,” replies his friend. “When I read a Jewish newspaper I hear of our woes and terrible fate. When I read Der Stürmer I hear we control the banks, world media and international governments.”

(common in many versions, this version from here: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-antisemitism-here-and-now-by-deborah-lipstadt-jeremy-corbyn-isnt-an-antisemite-but-5qpkrgvjm)

Does Facebook harm its readers' psyches more by driving engagement with a stories of tragedy, scandal, and negativity? Or by popularizing the "influencers" who radiate upbeat, sunny positivity and make me feel fat, ugly, poor, and contemptible?

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I don't have a solution to this, but it's especially frustrating when it comes to coverage of the developing world. I'll never forget a time I was watching CNN in a doctor's waiting room (which has got to violate the Hippocratic oath) and they were reporting on a terrorist attack in Indonesia, and quoted zero Indonesians, and I wondered: did they report even ONE non-terrorist-attack-related story about the world's fourth most populous country that year? I'm inclined to doubt it; another time I was forced to watch CNN (2016, airport, flight delayed) they gave more airtime to the 100% doomed, footnote-to-a-historical-footnote Kasich presidential campaign than to any country on Earth other than the United States. The developing world only shows up on your screen when someone is blowing it up. My understanding is a lot of Africans in particular find the negativity bias in Western coverage of Africa to be fairly insulting. And this negative bias has plenty of distortionary effects: it leads people to assume people in the developing world need white saviors, and when a terrible tragedy occurs, all that negative news promotes insincere solidarity without any real appreciation of their meaning; "violence in the Middle East" is taken to be a dog-bites-man story rather than a tragedy.

Of course, economic development is basically designed to be the opposite of news. "Le bonheur n'a pas d'histoire," as they say. So it's worth saying it out loud: there are 160 million people in Bangladesh. Economic development at the rate they've been having it means millions more people getting enough to eat every day, millions more people getting reliable electricity, millions more people living to see their grandchildren grow up, millions more people rolling their eyes at boring office jobs instead of breaking their backs in grinding agricultural labor. Life is sweet and we shouldn't take these victories for granted.

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Come to think of it, I think “people like to get mad” is not quite as accurate as “people think the news is for getting mad.” Positive stories that get engagement tend to be about one individual person or animal, never a policy that worked or a broad positive trend. Stuff like Humans of New York and The Dodo gets lots of engagement! And to some degree it’s technically “news”, even if media scholars aren’t putting these sites in their datasets. I wish people liked stories about systems working as much as stories about people beating the system, but at least it’s not a case of global misanthropy.

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In one sense, there really is nothing new here. "If it bleeds, it leads" has long been a journalistic norm because even before the advent of big data and formal cognitive studies, journalists understood what kind of news captured the most eyeballs.

In another sense, your take is strangely puritanical.

Facebook algorithms and the focus on "bad news" to get more eyeballs and clicks is exploiting a well-known cognitive flaw that's wired into the human brain. Blaming "us" because this exploit works so well, particularly thanks to modern technology which increases its effectiveness, is like blaming us not only for cigarettes being addictive but blaming us for being even more addicted to the high-nicotine variants.

As big data, social media engagement algorithms, and journalism continue down this path of optimizing and maximizing engagement, they become more like drug dealers and tobacco companies as opposed to honest sources of objective information. So, I don't think the news and social media get to have it both ways - they can't be the self-appointed arbiters of facts and truth while at the same time chasing engagement by gaming flaws in human cognitive psychology.

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"Journalism is the first rough draft of history." - Phillip Graham, former publisher, Washington Post.

"All first drafts suck." - Common saying among writers.

Maybe we need more humility among among journalists, and more skepticism among consumers of news.

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I live in Vietnam and the headlines are noticeably more positive here, which is probably a reflection of the less competitive media landscape (not to mention doubtless self-censorship of negative stories to avoid drawing the gaze of government officials).

Current headlines: Vietnam's current coronavirus wave has peaked; Forty-two firms resume operations in coronavirus epicenter; Quang Ninh reopens tourist destinations; 55th covid patient dies in Vietnam; Vietnam strengthens local currency against the dollar; Priority clearance given for flights with covid vaccines; HCMC pins high hopes on social distancing order to control outbreak.

It's not ALL positive. But I always find it startlingly positive compared to US media sources.

(Honestly, the whole experience makes me sympathetic to an anti-freedom of speech perspective.)

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"being mad all the time is not actually satisfying or conducive to human happiness."

Amen.

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I have personally been consciously checking my negative story clicking impulse much as possible. Realizing that most headlines are actually sensationalistic and alarmist. My simple tests are whether I actually believe it's true as presented, and is it really something I should worry about.

And it's had a noticeable impact on my mood as well freeing mental energy.

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