If it bleeds, it leads: heal the symptoms of negative news by understanding the cause
by Keelin Everly-Lang
Illustrations by Lada Chizhova. Our nonprofit generates funding in multiple ways, including through affiliate linking. When you purchase something through an affiliate link on this site, the price will be the same for you as always, but we may receive a small percentage of the cost.
Why is the news so negative?
Scrolling through any news site, it can seem like the world is full of mostly sad and tragic circumstances. Is this an accurate and full picture of our world? And what are the consequences of us thinking it is if it isn’t?
News researcher Jodie Jackson explained in a recent interview that the news landscape is so overwhelmingly focused on problems and so lacking in solutions because of an unconscious preference that we have toward this type of information. This is called negativity bias.
Negativity bias describes the psychological phenomenon that we pay more attention to negative information than positive information. Knowing that audiences react more strongly to negative news has led to the idea that “if it bleeds, it leads, in news publications.
In a 2019 PNAS article, researchers who studied the evidence of negativity bias in reactions to news describe this relationship by saying, “Negativity biases affect news selection, and thus also news production, as well as citizens’ attitudes about current affairs.”
As readers of news, we can even get stuck in cycles of anxiety because our negativity bias is stronger when we are in a state of fear. This can cause us to seek out more negative information, which can increase our anxiety even more. When stuck in this loop, it can feel like consuming more news will help us be more vigilant against the problems in the world.
Lada Chizhova
It might feel like a fix, but in reality, consuming more negative news in this state can contribute to a skewed picture of what is truly happening in the world and increase our feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Becoming aware of your own negativity bias can help you understand why you click on the articles you do and why you might feel a desire to read negative news — even when you’ve observed that doing so tends to spike your anxiety. To help get us out of this anxiety spiral and to encourage more balanced news, adding solutions journalism into your newsfeed mix can help.
Solutions journalism describes news that includes how a community is responding to a problem, not just the problem by itself. This type of journalism helps readers see a path forward and have a deeper understanding of the context around the issue.
Thought leaders of solutions journalism encourage news producers to deepen and add complexity to a reader’s understanding of an issue. Traditional news often drives its stories with the tension between two opposing sides and the problems they have with one another.
Solutions stories still have tension, but it is centered in the response and how well it is working. This takes the focus off the high-stakes drama of the problem and gives more context to the entire conversation about how to solve it. Modifying how and what kind of news we consume can change our own mental health. It can also encourage news organizations to center more balanced coverage. Every one of our clicks, likes, and shares has an impact on the stories media organizations report on down the road.
Lada Chizhova
Fractured reality, fractured relationships
Living in a state of fear due to a lack of solutions and an unrealistic sense of reality can cause other problems that affect our mental health. It can skew our sense of safety and risk, which can cause interpersonal issues, change the way we vote, and reshape our society. Jackson shared that there are many ways that this can be damaging. “Not least of all, it can fracture relationships because we have fractured realities.” Her research has shown that building a skill for looking for solutions stories can be one tool to repair some of these fractures, because this part of the story is often so absent.
Another tool for repairing these realities is to build news literacy skills. The term news literacy usually refers to skills that help people interpret news and provide tools to spot fake news and misinformation. Jackson emphasizes that this traditional definition of news literacy does not go far enough because traditional news can effectively be misinformation even if everything that is reported is true. If solutions and responses are never reported, the news isn’t actually telling the whole story.
In Jackson’s opinion, the news literacy conversation “needs to move beyond just misinformation and address misrepresentation.” A group in Pennsylvania is working on using news literacy to combat violence based on this understanding. One article about the project included this background: “Kira Hamman, senior director of Urban Rural Action, added that consuming misinformation can be a risk factor that contributes to people carrying out acts of targeted violence.”
Negative news can also impact our voting decisions or make us not want to participate in democracy at all. Jackson explains that “Traditional news showcases the worst of democracy continuously. So it's no wonder that people lose faith in those institutions. You're constantly witnessing corruption, scandal, a lack of character, extreme views. And that makes it very unrepresentative of what a lot of people probably feel and think. And so democracy doesn't necessarily reflect them in their opinions in a way, or they just become disillusioned by it because they feel like, well, I don't want this guy representing me. I don't believe in this person, or this, that, and the other.”
The impact of this misrepresentation is that it messes with our sense of risk. Jackson says, “We're more fearful of things that actually don't pose a threat and we're less fearful of things that are significantly threatening. So we have this distorted or warped relationship with risk, because of how available this information is to us. And it affects how we vote.”
This understanding of the importance of news literacy in our relationship with consuming the news led Jackson to start the News Literacy Lab. Among other things, it provides a list of resources and information to start changing your news diet.
Lada Chizhova
The winning combination: balance and awareness
It is important to combine the addition of solutions journalism with other strategies and not make responses or positive news your entire news diet. Both Jackson and this study of the relationship between political news and emotions emphasized that a healthy relationship with the news has to be about balance. Jackson explained that “If you were to get solutions journalism to excess, again, you can underestimate risk. You can engage in really risky or even reckless behavior because of the lack of significance you think the problem poses.”
Excessive consumption of solutions stories has “also been shown to increase levels of shame and inadequacy because you see so many people doing good things and you become guilty about your own lack of personal contribution.”
The good news is that balancing your news diet can have a lot of positive impacts. Learning about how problems are being fixed doesn’t mean the problems don’t exist. What it does mean is that changing how we consume news can change our perspective, which can change our feelings, thoughts, actions, behaviors, and, ultimately, our world.