Then let’s all smile together : )

http://www.happynews.com/
http://www.positivenews.net/
http://www.goodnewsblog.com/

Comment counts seem to be out of whack. For example, the main page shows this post as having 3 comments as of right now, while the page view shows a count of only two - and only two comments are shown. Erin’s previous post shows 25 total, while the page view shows only 21 counted and 21 comments displayed. There are others that are out of sync too. This is frustrating, because I depend on comment counts on the main page to gauge whether a post has been commented on since I last checked. Please address this, if at all possible.

Thank you for your time. :)

http://www.happynews.com/
http://www.positivenews.net/
http://www.goodnewsblog.com/

Very informative comment. Thanks for sharing.

Funny but a newscaster came to my class last Tues and was asked that. He jokingly responded, “Well, many of us are alcoholics…”

A bigger concern, however, is how the overwhelmingly negative news shown on TV impacts the viewers. An academic article (Galician, 1983) reported that TV news directors began instituting a “bad news policy,” intentionally adding fluff for balance and always closing the newscast with at least two positive news items so people wouldn’t go to bed depressed. How touching. : )

There are numerous published papers on the imbalance of news toward negativity, with many of them focused on TV news. I’m posting excerpts from a class paper I did a few months ago, although I’ve reshuffled these excerpts (some are from my intro, most are from my lit review). Not too much on TV newscasts, though (my paper focused on the online news media). Reach me at my full name at msn.com if anyone cares for the bibliography–but a limitation is that most sources are from the 1980s.

Check this out too… a bit scattered all over: State of the News Media 2006: An Annual Report on American Journalism . “Chapters” are at left, click on those that concern TV news then go to bottom and click on “Content Analysis.”
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A media critic once said of news judgment, “Bad news is big news. Good news is no news. And, no news is bad news” (Wattenberg, 1983).

A common justification for the prevalence of bad news has been that most news is inherently negative because they hinge on conflict, one of the seven traditional news values that comprise news judgment (Galician and Pasternack, 1987).

Novelty, another news value, is easily lent to negativity; it can be reasoned a bank that is robbed is news while the thousands others that aren’t, isn’t (Friend et al, 2005).

The medium may be a factor in news judgment. Because of the visual arrest of a blazing fire, for example, we can expect TV newscasts to give more play to a forest fire than a newspaper would (White et al, 1985). In determining video content, a 1986 survey of TV news directors showed that 62% agreed that “as a rule, bad news is more newsworthy than good news” (Galician and Pasternack, 1986).

Numerous scholarly mass communication studies charge editors and gatekeepers with distorting readers’ perception of the world and maintaining an obsession for tragedy, scandals and the lurid. They don’t say that these news should be suppressed; rather, they suggest that negative news articles occupy space that otherwise would have gone to more newsworthy positive articles.

A 1993 study reported that a poll showed 64% of news consumers think there is “too much emphasis on negative news” (Shaw, 1993). Several 1980s content analyses of daily newspapers found that the news presented was overwhelmingly negative (Zillman et al, 1998). A year-long content analysis of St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed a lower tendency of positive news on the front page than anywhere else except for business section, and that the news were usually placed in an adversarial light (Rodgers et al, 2000). A 1998 study of eight daily newspapers showed one in seven stories was on crime (Artwick and Gordon) and a 2006 study reported that crime coverage comprised one of six articles (State of the News Media, 2006).

That the news media gravitate toward negative news is not a recent observation of American newspapers. In the 18th century, the press carried stories not only on sex and murders but also suicide, alcohol, monsters and vampires (Copeland, 1992). Newspapers in the late 19th century are known for the stain of Yellow Journalism. In fact, Hearst’s insistence on creating the Spanish-American War is well documented (Straubhaar and LaRose, 2000). Responding to a perceived media preoccupation with sensationalism, the Hutchins Commission in 1947 outlined recommendations for balance. In the decades since, though, studies continue to show that the print media judged negative events as being more newsworthy (e.g. Peterson, 1979; Bohle, 1986).

Not only is it easy to generalize news as negative, it may be easier to report on negative news. In a 1993 comparison of newspapers covering different suburbs of Chicago—one affluent, the other not so, an editor said of the less affluent suburb, “We struggle to find ways to cover what’s not a social problem. The reaction you get is: ‘If it’s not a problem, why cover it? What’s the story?” Another editor said, “Crime is easy for us also because it’s a clear cut thing. A guy’s dead and you only need to talk to one source – the cops” (Ettema and Peer, 1996).

Some news editors claim their judgment simply show society as is (Siebert, 1974); however, several studies dispute that. Crime stories in the media is out of proportion with the actual crime rate (O’Keefe and Reid-Nash, 1987) and articles on rape were found to be more frequent if the victim did not successfully defend herself (Gordon and Heath, 1981).

Some argue that a negative slant in news coverage indicates a responsible press. Sensationalistic news serves their readers by teaching moral boundaries and calling to attention where maintenance is needed by “advancing moral discourse” and “encouraging self-examination” (Stevens, 1985). And given that a democracy depends on information that affect their everyday lives, editors think it both ethical and imperative that they report on problems that exist in their communities (Slattery, 1994). In short, while positive news entertains, negative news informs.