Why is so much bad news being talked about? As a possible reason, people might be more interested in bad news than good. People pay more attention to bad news than good news, researchers from 17 countries found. That’s based on research published this week in the journal PNAS. It suggests that inadequate news coverage may be partly fueled by a human desire to be negative. Data showed that not everyone was like this. Some people had a positive bias, which meant there might be a market for happy news, but not everyone was like this.
This topic is important now that the world’s news is much more damaging than it used to be.
Scholars believe that journalists are cynical, angry people who write negative stories bad for democracy and bad for people who read the news.
In Soroka’s opinion, this is why the media is so skewed. Our theory was that the news looked wasn’t just because of how journalists felt but because of how viewers responded to it.
The experts said that a negative bias may have evolved because humans have changed over time. For one thing, it’s riskier to ignore bad news (like an impending storm) than good news (a dog rescues a boy from a tree). In the study, the bad news is something you should be on the lookout for, so keep an eye out.
The negative bias has been studied a lot, but the subjects were primarily college-aged white Americans. Afterward, Soroka wanted to know if their findings could be used in other parts of the world.
In total, 1,156 people from 17 different countries were chosen to participate in the study. Scientists from Brazil and other countries in the Western Hemisphere were finding the participants.
When they could, the researchers tried to get people from a broader range of backgrounds to help them out. When they had their lab equipment, they went to a building site in India. They also looked for people in Ghana’s markets.
According to the study, on the whole, people were a little more interested in seeing more negative news. Soroka said this was true no matter what country or culture you came from.
Soroka, for example, said that news organizations might be able to focus less on bad stories and still get a lot of attention.
As a child, I heard many people say that there was no such thing as bad publicity. As long as people talk about you, it has to be a good thing. Even if bad things are said about you or your company, it doesn’t matter what people think about you. As a result, your relevance isn’t lost. It was unknown until then. There are a lot more examples that can be looked up. They all have one thing in common: They have become known to people who would have never heard of them before.
Conclusion
Most of the time, organizations work hard to make themselves look good in the media, like talking about their unique strategy, well-thought-out vision, standout products or services, successes, or substantial financial performance. Getting media attention doesn’t always mean that you get a lot of free PR. Indeed, this is where a publisher’s freedom is put to good use, as I said. As soon as you start talking to a journalist, you give that person permission to make up their mind about your story and write about it. It can happen when a product or service doesn’t meet the journalist’s expectations, leading to bad press.