Good News or Bad News...What Sells?

Without a doubt mainstream media is a study in contrasts. Their bad habits are rewarded with more viewers, more readers, more listeners. By reporting good news they would be eliminating the "shock factor". Without that factor, it is hard for the media to compete among themselves and gain notoriety and recognition. They can't go to the same extremes with good news that they can with bad news.

Think about it...with bad news, reporters can catch a family member in the throes of grieving after a loss, they can show the aftermath of a fire or bomb as compared to how the same building or location looked before the event. There's no end to it. Here is a happy person at his or her wedding and here's the plane that crashed days later and left the same person without a future. Bad news creates the potential for the media to not just yank at heart strings, but to rip them, cut them up, and toss them away!

It's like a house. It's just those big dust bunnies, a dirty sink, a cloudy window, or the smell of trash that really catches a visitor's eye and nose. Who really notices when the same house is clean? Whens the last time someone remarked to you that so-and-so's house looked clean? It's always the flaws, the negatives that seem to rise to the surface.

It's the same with news. Good news is kind of blah. How many people would turn the page of a newspaper when the front page was just filled with good news. My guess is it would be very few readers who would. Give those same folks a brutal crime or car crash that took the life of a young mother and you've got your readership locked up with the key thrown out.

It's sad really, but my theory is that bad news offers more of an escape from reality than good news does, and escape is something everyone seeks. Some go to extremes by abusing drugs or alcohol, others lose themselves in a violent video, song, or movie. The mainstream population has the Internet, TV, radio and newspapers to depend on for their daily fix. If those forms of media deliver, most consumers will accept the package.

In the U.S. we're all about the money and what sells. Unfortunately, what sells is bad news over good news. It's not right. It's not something we should be proud of, but it is what it is. A sad commentary on the state of the world today.