Sky Views: Why we are drawn to bad news

Ed Conway, economics editor

As a journalist, I am often asked why we are obsessed with bad news.

Why can't we stop spending so much time covering what's going wrong in the world and spend a bit more time covering what's going right?

There is a standard response we hacks tend to have to such questions: our job is to report what is happening - not to distort the news to try and put a rose-tinted glow on it.

If, for instance, I am reporting that the economy is weaker now than it was before the EU referendum that's a statement of fact (or rather, a statement of what a weighted average of statistics are telling us).

Sure, I could spend my time searching solely for good news stories but that would be a dereliction of my duty to try to communicate what's really going on in the world.

In short, journalists should seek to tell the truth; not to cheerlead.

But that answer, while completely valid, is also a bit of a cop-out.

In much the same way as drivers stop and gawp when they pass an accident on the road, we all have a morbid fascination with scary news stories.

If you flick through a newspaper on a given day, it's hard to escape the fact that the majority of it is what most of us would describe as "bad news". For instance, in the entire news section of yesterday's Times, there were 14 stories that might best be categorised as bad news stories. There was, at a stretch, one good news story.

If you were to take our news coverage as a proxy for what is going on in the world, you'd be left with the impression that the world is riddled with crime, disaster, death, disappointment and conflict.

But as we all know, it is not.

In most parts of the world, most of the secular trends are most certainly "good news" stories: life expectancies are (mostly) rising. Disease mortality is falling. Crime rates are dropping. The number of people being killed in wars is falling. In the meantime, the number of people out of work is at record lows on both sides of the Atlantic, and even though income levels are rising at slow rates, they are, nonetheless, rising.

This stuff is actually happening. It is not (to borrow an awful phrase) fake news.

So why doesn't it trouble our newspapers (and TV news) more? Why don't we spend a bit more time talking about those good, secular long-term stories?

There are all sorts of answers. The prosaic one is that it is a news organisation's job to report on, well, news. In other words: surprising or unexpected things. Our job is to report the out-of-the-ordinary stuff. Good journalists are, by their very nature, contrarians. The more something is taken for granted or is unexceptional, the less likely it is to capture our attention.

So the slow, steady march of progress as we get richer and healthier is often neglected not because it is inconvenient or uninteresting, per se, but because it is not out of the ordinary. We are used to it. In this case, no news is good news.

But again this isn't a fully satisfying answer. For every journalist will, if they are being honest with themselves, acknowledge that bad news tends to garner more coverage than good news. They will know that often if they come to their newsdesk with two stories - one bad, one good - the bad news story is more likely to make the front page. Not always; but more often than not.

Why? Well, tempting as it is to blame the metropolitan elite, or a shadowy cabal of media moguls obsessed with "talking the country down", the answer ultimately comes back to human nature.

Humans are innately drawn to bad news. In much the same way as drivers stop and gawp when they pass an accident on the road, we all have a morbid fascination with scary news stories. A few years researchers at McGill University in Canada carried out an experiment tracking which stories people reading news websites were most attracted to.

It turned out that time and again the subjects were mostly drawn to the negative stories. Yet when they were later asked about their attitude towards news they testified that, you've guessed it, they preferred good news and that news organisations were overly fixated on bad news.

Our brains, it turns out, are hard-wired to give priority to bad news. This is part of our survival instinct. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman puts it, "By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal's odds of living long enough to reproduce... No comparably rapid mechanism for recognising good news has been detected."

Indeed, some years ago psychologists at Case Western Reserve University produced a paper entitled Bad Is Stronger Than Good, which found: "Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.

"The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones... Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found."

And this, I'm afraid, is the uncomfortable answer.

News organisations prioritise bad news not because they are obsessed with it. They prioritise it because bad news is what their readers are most drawn to.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Sophy Ridge - Stalking laws urgently need updating