“Bad News” is Good News

I have often wondered why the news is so depressing. Newspapers, magazines, and television are obsessed with “bad news.” Murder, theft, rape, war, hatred — everything evil spatters across headlines and stories, usually accompanied by vivid photographs or video. News commentators occasionally tut-tut about this predilection of the media to cover the worst aspects of humankind but offer little in the way of a solution.

I have come to the conclusion that no solution is necessary. Depressing headlines are the best sign that things are mostly right with the world. Why that is so has a lot to do with what news is. News is something that is out of the ordinary. In fact, it sparks the interest of readers precisely because it is so far removed from their experience that it fascinates with its unreality.

The reason that The News is bad is that bad news is so rare, and disasters are so uncommon, that their very rarity makes them newsworthy. The flip side of this is something that is seldom stated — good news is so common that it is unnecessary to report it!

Consider murder for a moment. The news media have been accused of “glorifying” murderers by giving their crimes front page coverage. But how many people are murdered in an average day? Ten? One hundred? One thousand? On the other hand, how many people are left unmurdered each day? Billions! Which is the more unusual? Which is the more surprising? Which is news?

Think of what sort of world we would be living in where the eyegrabbing headlines would read “MAN WALKS HOME FROM WORK AND LIVES!” or “LOCAL WOMAN GOES UNRAPED FOR FIVE DAYS!” or “CITY MYSTERIOUSLY UNTOUCHED BY WAR.” Only in a world where catastrophe is the standard would such events be considered extraordinary, fascinating, and newsworthy.

The Challenger disaster was Big News because the previous two dozen flights had gone up without a perceptible hitch. Had it been the norm for spacecraft to explode and kill all passengers, then the one that lifts off with no problems would be the one to merit Second Coming headlines. And that held true again for the next 70+ flawless flights: the missions were non-events as far as the press was concerned. Until Columbia.

The truth about Bad News is that it clearly demonstrates how good life is otherwise. Certainly there is room for news about something unbelievably good that happens. That, too, is unusual and therefore News. On the whole, though, Bad News predominates because misfortune, terror, and crime are aberrations. Disaster is not a part of anyone’s everyday life. For the most part, people get along with one another. Generally, they do not rob, rape, or murder their neighbors. It takes a great deal of effort for any government to whip them into conducting war against one another. People, all in all, tend to be kind, non-interfering, productive sorts who conduct themselves peaceably and with a minimum of friction.

We are not curious about the person who can cope with day-to-day stress — nearly all of us do that every moment of our lives. What attracts our attention is the lone soul who goes off his rocker and causes a bloodbath — here is someone most people are not likely to run into every day — or ever. How often is a psychopath described as seeming “normal,” or “just like the guy next door”? Doesn’t that indicate that the “normals” outnumber the psychopaths? If we are all secretly madmen, why bother making the comparison? Rather, so few of us are murderously insane — and so few of us can be pushed in that direction — that the deviant is worthy of notice simply because of his scarcity.

So it goes with the scarcity of tragedy. We are not interested in the person who swallows a headache capsule and safely has his headache relieved — that happens to almost all of us. What is News is the rare individual who swallows a capsule and dies. What better sign do we need that medicine is generally benign?

Certainly, nothing is more abhorrent than murder, calamity, violence, and death. They are a tragic part of human existence. But they are not the primary part of human existence — not by a long shot — and they are treated properly in the news by being given coverage in inverse proportion to their prevalence.

So hail the good news of Bad News! After all, which world would you rather be living in — the world where human suffering is a rare event — News! — or one in which misery and destruction are so common that they merit no mention?

See you in the funny pages.