Negativity In the News

A recent study looking into the effects of negative and emotional words on news consumers found that while on average more positive and neutral words are used in news headlines than negative and emotional ones, negative words in headlines increased the consumption rate of the article to which they were attached, while positive word-bearing headlines did the opposite.

This is different from the “medium bias” with which news is arguably burdened, as a plane crashing tends to be reported as news, but a plane landing safely (as almost all of them do) is just another (expected and normal) statistic.

So journalism is, through some lenses at least, inherently negative in the sense that it presents us with a torrent of information that violates our expectations, reporting on things that are beyond the norm—planes crashing, not planes landing safely.