News Infection

IF YOU EMPHASIZE some points and play down trivial details when you're telling a story, it makes the story more interesting, more entertaining, or more attractive. Emphasizing some points and underplaying details is called "sharpening and leveling." Because of the pressures people in the media are under, and the fact that they are all competing with each other for your attention, they sharpen and level their stories fairly often, and the result is a misleading view of the world, broadcast to millions.

For example, a student at Duke University named Lee Fried gave an envelope to the president of the university. Supposedly the envelope contained a prediction about an important event.

A week later, the envelope was opened. Inside was a description of two 747 jet airliners that crashed into each other. The event had happened that week, killing 583 people. Astounding!

News media people interviewed Lee Fried. In the interviews, Fried told the interviewers that he was a magician and the "prophesy" was just a magic trick. The magician James Randi tried to find all the newspapers that covered the story. He found seventeen. Only one of those newspapers passed along the "trivial" detail that it was a magic trick.

In the process of making a story more compelling, sometimes stories fail to give an accurate impression of what really happened.

Along the same lines, Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate.com says U.S. citizens are suffering from a terrible sickness called social hypochondria. This is an unreasonable terror of horrible diseases and trends that are wiping out or traumatizing huge numbers of Americans. Child abuse, suicides, teen pregnancies, cloning, whatever. Americans are worried. Why? Is it because we're stupid? Gullible? Prone to anxiety? Or because we have enough wealth and leisure to watch enough television programming that results in the seemingly legitimate point of view that the world is a frightening, dangerous place?

I remember once asking thirty-four people I worked with whether they thought the world was going to be a better or a worse place a hundred years from now. Thirty-three said worse. I couldn't believe it.

If you get your information about the world primarily from the evening news, you'd definitely say "worse." If your main source of news is Scientific American, you'd definitely say "better." Why? Science is all about solving problems.

Think about the headlines you normally see in any given newspaper. The most common kind of headline says something terrible has happened or is happening or is about to happen. Contrast that with some headlines from a typical ScienceDaily (an email update on what scientists are working on) for the week of January 7th to 11th, 2002:

* CANCER-FIGHTING DRUG MAY WORK IN PREVENTION AND TREATMENT

* NEW CONTACT-LENS MATERIALS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE INDUSTRY, UT SOUTHWESTERN RESEARCHERS REPORT

* MICROBE FIRST TO BREAK DOWN PCBS

* PHYSICS RESEARCH SUGGESTS IT MIGHT BE POSSIBLE TO LENGTHEN BATTERY LIFE

* CLINICAL TRIALS FOR "CYTOBRUSH" DETECTION TECHNIQUE SHOW PROMISE IN FIGHT AGAINST ORAL CANCER

* NEW TREATMENT EXTENDS LIFE FOR PATIENTS WITH SMALL-CELL LUNG CANCER

* PROTEIN POINTS THE WAY TO SALT-TOLERANT CROPS, PURDUE SCIENTISTS SAY

I didn't give you all the headlines for that issue. There were fifty in all. But you get the idea. A few were negative findings, some were neutral (about the composition of the sun or primordial air). But as you can see, the overall impression is that things are being found out and problems are being solved. Smart people are spending their time making the world a better place. That is an entirely different impression than you get from television news.

You're not just getting facts from news sources. You're getting a feeling about the world you live in, and often that feeling is not an accurate reflection of the world. The more you know about how it works, the easier it will be for you to protect yourself against a "pessimism infection."

Read more: When Newscasters Catastrophize For Profit

Learn more about how it works in the category how pessimism worms its way into your mind.