Sta Hungry Stay Foolish

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A blog by Leon Oudejans

The bad news cycle

For a long time, I’ve been wondering why news is always negative. I’ve stopped viewing conservative and liberal news on TV. Both annoy me with their negative attitudes. I still listen to radio news despite their hidden bias. For some time, I wondered if there’s another label than negative / positive.

Recently, I had a breakthrough: the bad news cycle is related to the cycle of Doubt, Fear, Hope & Love.

Nearly all news is related to:

  • doubt (eg, changing facts or objective truths into opinions or subjective truths), and/or
  • fear (eg, immigrants, Islam, skin colour, transgender).

Example: Donald Trump is an expert in the above.

Usually, news media claim it’s boring writing about Hope and Love. That might (indeed) be true.

I suppose the (“boring”) column at the right is thus mostly about individual – or micro – news. Why would all of us (ie, macro) be interested in the news about an individual unless that particular news item is very curious.

News articles related to Doubt and/or Fear (indeed) raise our curiosity. I am not an exception. The more curious, the more I’m interested. There might be a blog in such articles. However, usually I’m bored after reading a few lines. Such articles are often related to the click-bait-fight news cycle.

“The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.”

A quote by American economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman (b.1934) from his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011, p.342)

Bad Bad News (2018) by Leon Bridges
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-artist, Wiki-album+song

Note: all markings (bolditalicunderlining) by LO unless in quotes or stated otherwise.

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