Media's Negative Bias

PEOPLE WHO WORK IN TELEVISION are under intense pressure. The competition is unbelievably stiff. In any given hour, a television show is competing with lots of other stations for your attention. When you're watching television — you or any other viewer — it's very easy to change the channel, right? You don't even have to get up out of your chair. A television show is not only competing with other shows, it is competing with anything else you might want to do: Go sailing, read a book, visit a friend.

If a station can't capture enough peoples' attention, the station loses advertising and they go out of business. So a top priority of any television producer is to prevent you from changing the channel. One of the most effective tricks a television producer can use is to scare you. Fear compels attention better than anything else. The threat of danger is captivating, arresting, mesmerizing.

When a station is thinking up ways to let you know about an upcoming program on healthy living, for example, they have a variety of possibilities. They could appeal to your natural desire to be healthier. They could appeal to your self-esteem, implying that watching their program proves you're a good person. And so on. Or they could threaten you with danger.

Here are two possible announcements of the same program; which is more compelling?

1) "Find out if your children are safe from this terrible disease."

2) "Get some health tips from a doctor."

The fear appeal is more upsetting, but it's more likely to get you to watch the program.

Other kinds of appeals work, of course, and television isn't all bad. But it is an important point of vulnerability. You are vulnerable to lamprey invasions (metaphor for pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism) when you watch television because producers and advertisers use fear to compel your attention. They even use certain kinds of voices to tell you about programs coming up. Listen to how the announcer tells you about an upcoming news program or drama. It sounds like he's telling you something of vital, life-saving importance. They do everything they can to make you feel you must watch the program.

In the Christmas movie, Scrooged, Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a television producer. His staff shows him their latest ad for an upcoming Christmas special. Frank watches it and then gets angry at his staff. They protest: "People like the ad; it's getting a great response."

Frank bursts out, "That isn't good enough! They've got to be so scared to miss it! So terrified!"

Scrooged is a comedy. Frank's response is obviously a joke. But one of the things that makes a joke funny is the truth in it.

Producers and advertisers and television executives hire read about psychologists' experiments on what holds attention. Unfortunately, the threat of danger does very well in these tests. Our ancestors didn't survive by ignoring danger or potential danger. No animals could survive very long ignoring danger. So our emotional and perceptive systems are on stand-by alert for anything that seems threatening. Add to this the stiff competition between stations and what do you get? You get television stations that try harder and harder to scare you into watching their programs.

What do you think that does to your general perception of the world? What effect do you think it has on your world view?

Television is the most unprecedented point of vulnerability for lamprey invasions that has ever occurred. The television-watching population gets infected with pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism — against their will and without even supposing a single evil intention on the part of anyone.

I'm not saying there are no evil intentions in the television business. I'm sure there are, and I'm equally sure they're a minority. But even if a producer wanted to emphasize good news or create a positive attitude in viewers, or to simply slant the news in a less threatening way, what would happen? Imagine a viewer channel surfing. He'd find pleasant stuff on one channel, and gripping, compelling, threatening, can't-take-my-eyes-off-it stuff on another channel.

Guess which channel will have the most watchers over time (even against the watchers' will). Who will get more money from advertisers? Which station will eventually get taken off the air because it wasn't pulling in enough money from advertisers to support it?

After decades of this kind of competition, what we have are a lot of negative, alarmist, danger-oriented programs. Even some positive programs are advertised using the threat of danger. Television watchers are compelled by millions of years of natural selection to be taken in by it. Television programmers are no more likely to be evil than the rest of us. But like the rest of us, they need to pay their bills. To stay in business, they need to stay on the air. They need to get enough people watching their programs so they can have enough advertising money to keep going.

The result of all these ways of trying to exploit your most fundamental drive for survival is that you get the impression the world is a more dangerous place than it really is. You can easily get the impression things are getting worse, even when things are getting better.

Read more here:

News Infection

When Newscasters Catastrophize For Profit