Every day when I come into work, I look at the news. Be it in the Metro, on the BBC news site or even cheekily read off the back of somebody's Telegraph, (oh come on! They're so big it's hard not to..) what I always seem to see first is something horrible happening in the world.
Now, I'm not suggesting that I want to wander round with blinkers on and I know of course that millions of things happening in the world are horrible and a lot of the time, the rest of the world need to be made aware of them. I also know, perhaps more prominently in the business world, that bad news travels faster than good news. But the question is: does bad news sell better than good news?
With all that goes on in the world, most recently being the floods in Australia, the quake in New Zealand and the various political uprisings and fighting in North Africa, of course people want to be kept up to date with what's going on. But would it be so difficult to have a few more items of good news amongst this? I realise that in most newspapers and even occasionally on the BBC 10 o'clock news, there will be a few pieces of uplifting news buried somewhere. Perhaps this is a tried and tested balance between having all bad news and too much good news. However, is it simply just the phrase 'bad news travels fast' that is just so ingrained in our brains that we actively crave it?
An interesting thing to note here could be the recent ITV series Marchlands. The ending caused absolute uproar on Twitter and Facebook because after all the build up, people felt it ended too weak and pathetically. You could say that all that ITV did was end the series on a happy, uplifting note. Would people have been happier with an ending that ended badly for the families?
Perhaps, bad news actually reminds us that the things going wrong in our lives are not as bad as they could be. Is bad news in fact necessary to give us a better perspective on our lives? Going along this line of thought, you might say that bad news actually has an uplifiting effect! Although I'm not sure I like the idea of somebody feeling better about themselves from learning about somebody else's more serious misfortunes..
Another problem that I have had is trying to define 'good news'. Invariably, what one person sees as good news, somebody else sees as bad news. I would like to think that there has to be something that everybody can agree on although everytime I think of something, I think of possible people who would disagree with it. After some help from Alex Charraudeau, the best I could come up with was 'puppy digs up £10,000,000 and shares it with everybody'. Can anybody think of an argument to that? I'm sure there are many..
Personally, if there could be more stories about maybe a budgie learning to water-ski, or somebody who has been struggling with finding work for years finally seeing their business becoming successful then I would feel more sunny in my day to day life! Even with something as unpopular as the Government cuts, there must be somebody somewhere who is benefitting from them, however far-fetched that may sound!
So maybe there should be just one day a month or every 2 months even, where there is just good news and newspapers are forbidden to write anything upsetting-they could get all the good news out there and people like me could savour it 'til the next one came out. Or maybe I should just read the comic strips at the back of the paper and pipe down.
I do wonder, if nothing bad was happening, would newspapers even have anything to write about..?
Any thoughts?
-Emily
Picture credits: Essex1
Totally agree!
Posted by: Daniel Sieff | April 13, 2011 at 11:14