Comment by bcx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bcx | Hacker News Reader

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It is interesting to consider the media bias towards 'bad' news. For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative. Whether it's terrorism, kidnapping, ponzi schemes, car crashes, you name it, but why do some negative stories run more than others?

At some point media organizations found that people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.

http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soro... - Concludes there is a psychophysiological evidence that negative news is more arousing.

I suppose it follows that media concerning terrorism is probably more arousing than people being crushed by couches, and makes much better TV. And our perception of our reality is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to.

A great example of this would be the coverage of the fertilizer plant that blew up in Texas verses the Boston marathon bombings. These happened within days of each other. Which one did you hear about more? Which one killed more people?

> For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative … people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.

In your example, high speed rail launch is hardly breaking news. People are likely to be receiving updates on that rail through mass media since long before its construction even started. Train wreck, though, is a very unexpected event. A black swan.

Media does look for interesting stories (understandably), and it's been noticed that such stories tend to have certain qualities, like:

    Freshness
    Significance
    Proximity (geographical or otherwise)
    Famous people involved
    Human interest (appeal to emotion)

Train wreck is going to score high by all of these, expect possibly the famous people one. It may involve people we know, it engages our self-preservation instinct, it may directly affect our actions (e.g., stop using trains).

High speed rail launch is probably less ‘news’, as already mentioned (people knew it's being built). Perceived significance is less—long term convenience is hard to judge, and people have been living without it for ages anyway.

So I personally don't find it very surprising that ‘good’ stories tend to be less interesting than ‘bad’ ones, and I don't think it's because we, cruel creatures, love watching blood and suffering so much.

(I'm yet to read the paper you linked to, though.)

Edit: clarity, wording.

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