Bad News, Good News

Nova’s lengthy post talks about the growing tendency for our media to sensationalize all bad news, asks what effect it may be having on us, and proposes some fixes.

For awhile I’ve had a different reaction to this. In the US (and some other countries) we’ve built the world’s most advanced system for finding and distributing (over and over) bad news. No one has ever been able to detect, dig into, hyper analyze, and force feed more bad news than the media system we’ve gotten to today.

On the other hand, we have around 300M folks in the US. How many really bad stories are there per day, week or month? With that many people, and that good of a “bad news collection” system, that’s all the really bad news there is? I think that’s something to feel good about!