Psychology.
- Feeding people bad news makes them scared.
- Scared people want to be kept updated, so tune into the news.
- Repeat.
Also:
- Scared people look for authority to guide them.
- Lots of money/power to be gained by having crowds of people who trust you.
Presenting people with scary news keeps them coming back to you and offers opportunities for the stakeholders to profit.
Exactly the same reason social media presents awful stuff all the time now. Social media does it because ragebait is more profitable than nice stuff.
What’s ironic is that advertisers limit speech because they don’t like upsetting content and should love a good news channel.
If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.
The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.
Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.
Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.
doesnt sell.
The UK’s ITV News at Ten used to have a segment called “And Finally…” at the end of the broadcast that was intended to be light-hearted (but still somewhat newsworthy) in order to soften whatever horrors might have gone before it earlier.
I haven’t watched TV news in years, but apparently they don’t do that any more.
But what would they do when they run out of good news in the first 7 minutes?
The purpose of the news isn’t to make you feel good, it’s to inform you of what’s happening outside your front door. But there’s neither time nor space to tell you everything, so some editorial work is required to distill it down to something you can reasonably absorb. Every news source has a different policy around how that is done, obviously. Good news has its audience, but it’s smaller than the one for other kinds of news. And since news costs money to gather, news outlets rely on advertising as a primary source of income. A bigger audience brings in more advertisers and more money, ergo, bad news is the way to go.
The good news shows are the morning shows at the weekend but they also end up basically being ads for small businesses that have an in with the producers.
There are a couple of decent YouTube good news shows I think though
Serious question in rebuttal. How does “good news” help you understand why gas prices are up? How does it help you know what food has been recalled due to contamination or whether people are in need of assistance because a winter storm stranded them in their homes?
“Good news only” is a luxury for people who do not want to know what is happening and can’t cope with reality.
Good news helps people stay in touch with reality. How does bad news help people decide if they should buy an IC or EV car? How does it help you know what diseases have new treatments? What parts of nature have been preserved and how people can help the cause?
If one polarizes their view on information to be “good” or “bad,” in other words, if you assign labels to the information you receive, then you avoid certain pieces of information that will help you make real world decisions.
what makes something good or bad is subjective. In the inimitable words of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, “one man’s waste is another man’s soap… ya’ know what I mean, guys?”
If you only ever hear bad news, this can also demoralise and disincentivise people from taking action. That’s why I usually balance them a bit, to avoid doomscrolling. Keep yourself informed, but don’t demoralise yourself.
Not a TV show but Sam Bentley on YouTube does a monthly good news recap.
And the link for Sam Bentley Good News
Alice in Wonder1and did a good news series last year, but it’s on hiatus. I hope she brings it back!
because that would feel really tone deaf in the current environment
