A few years ago I grumbled about the overwhelmingly negative tone of much of the mainstream media.  It was based on a Wharton study that showed that we’re much more likely to spread good news than we are bad news.

In other words, good news stories were more likely to go viral, which given the desire for page views from pretty much any media source, has to be a good thing.

Alas, the message doesn’t really have reached the news editors, who still persist in flooding our screens and newspapers with wall to wall gloom.

It’s a topic that Southampton University’s Denise Baden is focusing on in her latest research.  Her study found that consuming negative news had a number of rather alarming affects on us.

For instance, reading a normal news story would usually be followed by a drop in mood amongst readers, with female readers suffering a 38 percent drop and men a 28 percent drop.

What’s more, framing news in a negative way makes us much less likely to take any kind of positive action on the issues we’ve just learned about.

This lethargy spread into other areas too, with those who were worried or saddened by the news found to be less likely to support a charity or help the environment.

Does it hold people to account?

One of the arguments behind publishing such negative content is that it is necessary in order to hold those in power to account for their actions.

As anyone with any organizational nous will tell you however, reporting on negative issues generally just gets people on the defensive, which in turn shuts down their prospects of changing.

Of course, part of this might be our own fault.  The research found that whilst we often claim we want to see more good news stories, when it came to monitoring our viewing/reading habits, we usually opted for the bad rather than the good.

The authors suggest this may be an evolutionary response to focus in on alarming things that may be dangerous to us.  In other words, it’s instinctive rather than voluntary.

Is that response still appropriate?  I’m not so sure, but it seems likely that the news media will continue to prey on it in order to get our attention.

The response however, may be that we eventually learn to switch off from the gorefest entirely and seek something altogether more enlightening (like this blog – ahem).

There are a number of projects underway to try and present the news in a more positive light.  Ventures such as the Constructive Journalism Project and Positive News are trying to provide news that is both informative but not unnecessarily grizzly.

Whether they ever make their way into the mainstream, only time will tell.