Five Reasons Why You Don’t Hear a Lot of Good News

Here are five reasons why you don’t hear a lot of good news. Futurist, Chet W. Sisk. Yes, it’s true. A lot of the negative news and information you feel all around you is because it’s being regularly provided to you through mainstream media and social media algorithms. But why?

Why don’t we get information about kittens being saved from trees, and a new solution to homelessness? Well, here are five factors at work.

Negative news is more appealing. It’s true. We tend to focus when people talk about bad news or threats. Media companies have just learned to monetize that aspect of your evolutionary self.

People tend to remember negative news more. It was Einstein who talked about the experiment where he did a problem 99 times and missed one. The students only remembered his miss.

Newsrooms have a bias. Many journalists may feel their job is to uncover the negative events in society as a service. To keep you informed. What they don’t do in equal measure is share the good things happening.

Our confirmation bias is at work. News consumers lean toward information that backs up their belief system, which can lead to even more negative news being fed to them through this algorithm.

In a competitive landscape for your attention, companies only go with the most sensational headlines, and those headlines tend to be negative and threatening because you pay attention to the negative or the threatening.

I know it’s a crazy cycle and hard to see our way out of it, but I can only say, take social and mainstream media breaks from time to time so that you can get clarity on what’s real and what’s not.