That is probably the number one question I am asked when I get into a conversation about the media.
I usually give as part of my answer the comment that it wouldn't be news that no planes crashed at the airport today. If there was a crash every day, it would stop being news
A column in this morning's Washington Post includes this:
There is a natural human bias toward bad news. The title of a 1998 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sums it up: “Negative Information Weighs More Heavily on the Brain.” Negative stimuli get our attention much more than positive stimuli — which makes evolutionary sense for survival. Nice things are enjoyable; bad things can be deadly, so focus on them. And given that, in the news media, attention equals money, we can see the commercial reason for a lack of headlines such as “Millions not going to bed hungry tonight.”
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