If it bleeds, it leads.
Anyone who has ever worked in the news media has heard that axiom, meaning death or destruction, or at least something really bad, gets played at the top of the page in a newspaper or is the first story on the TV news.
You may have noticed that strategy is being cited by those who rail against the media for using fear to manipulate citizens, with COVID-19 coverage being the latest, obvious example. Somehow, the theory goes, the media is involved in a huge conspiracy to perpetuate what is little more than a hoax in an effort to try to bring down the American, capitalistic way of life, and reporting the grim stories of coronavirus deaths or Expert A saying things won’t be back to normal for several years is a part of the plot.
So this agenda apparently drives all the reporting, dictating what stories are done and how prominently they are played in an effort to influence the consumer of news.
But what if the opposite is actually true? What if the agenda is far more capitalistic than the conspiracy theorists would like to believe? What if news organizations’ main goal is to, you know, have people read their stories or watch their reports?
And what if said consumers eat up tragedy, gobbling down bad news while ignoring good news as if it was a vegetable at the dinner table?
I don’t know the exact origin of “If it bleeds, it leads,” but I"m guessing it was a newspaper editor or publisher commenting on how a horrific event, or a series of bad events, drove up readership, continued by TV news execs who noticed ratings spikes on nights the lead story was something negative.
In our modern world, news services know exactly which stories or videos get all the online eyeballs. (Hint: It ain’t the one about Joe Sixpack getting an award pinned on his chest.)
It’s a man killing his estranged wife. Or a horrific murder case. Or missing women. Or a rape trial. Or the arrest of a gang member. Or a man violating stay-at-home orders.
Where do these specific examples come from? They were the Times stories that had the most online views in April. You have to go outside of the top 20 before you spot anything resembling “good news.” And the tendencies of our readers are no different than the tendencies of those living in Michigan or South Dakota or Great Britain or Japan.
It’s simply human nature.
Bad has a far more profound effect upon us than good. It’s why athletes or coaches remember the tough losses so much more vividly than the wins. It’s why, “What did you do to your hair?” after a trip to the salon sticks with someone while, “Your hair looks nice,” is appreciated but immediately forgotten. It’s why everyone is depressed about how their 401(k) has fallen over the past three months without appreciating how much higher it is today than it was 18 months ago.
Psychologists call it negativity bias. We simply pay more attention and dwell more on bad things than good things. Insults loom larger than praise. Traumatic events make more of an impression than happy ones. And we respond in kind.
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister has written extensively about this phenomenon. He was on the “Freakonomics Radio” podcast recently, and got to the gist of it: “The mind just overreacts to bad relative to good.”
On that podcast, it was discussed how it takes four or five good things to overcome one bad thing in someone’s mind. So whether you are a worker or in a relationship, when you mess up once, it takes four or five times of doing everything right for redemption to occur.
Negativity bias is why customer service is crucial. When you go to a restaurant, you expect a good experience. So when that happens, you don’t think twice about it. When, however, you get a poorly cooked meal or terrible service, you might not return to said restaurant and, in fact, you might post online about how awful it was.
Fair? No. But it’s how we tend to react as human beings.
Bad gets our attention. Bad resonates. And bad elicits responses.
So, the only conspiracy going on in the media is organizations conspiring to get your attention, to click on their stories and watch their reports.
And not only do consumers ignore the good news, such stories make so little an impression that the most common question we get is, “Why don’t you put more good news in the paper?”
It’s there, you just pay far more attention to the bad news. Because you are, after all, human.
Bob Blubaugh is the editor of the Carroll County Times. His column appears Sundays. Email him at bob.blubaugh@carrollcountytimes.com.