A Case against Bad News

Bad news sells, but it’s not good for our health.

Jeffrey Folks | May 24, 2026

Bad news in the media is what sells, and it has become ubiquitous, such that we are inured to it.  We can listen to the details of a triple-homicide and go on eating lunch.  We sometimes seek out footage that the announcer warns “may be disturbing,” a practice that psychologists call “doomscrolling.”  The media are filled with every form of violence, including violence against children and the elderly, and every sort of corruption, yet we suppose that exposure to such material will have no corrupting effect on us.  And yet with every week that passes, assuming we spend the U.S. average of five hours per day on screens, we may become more callous and less likely to see the goodness in the world.

The truth is that what the media present in the way of murder and mayhem is not real.  Yes, the violence that gets reported is factual, but the overemphasis on negative reporting misrepresents the true nature of life in America and in most other countries.  The impression left by the media that most of life is ugly, violent, and corrupt — and that’s the impression we get from 24/7 reporting of bad news — is totally false.  The truth is that there is goodness all around; it just doesn’t get reported, because it doesn’t attract eyeballs.

The good news that the media distort is that there are hundreds of millions of good people in our country, and billions around the globe, whose days are filled with small acts of kindness, and occasionally with heroic acts that are not small by any measure.  It would be refreshing to hear CNN........

© American Thinker