The past 50 years have seen a dramatic increase in reporters’ inclination toward demonstrating distressing reports rather than recent medical or technological achievements. Yet, there remains some disagreement as to whether the overall impact of this approach has been beneficial or detrimental. While this has brought challenging consequences, I strongly believe that the overall impact of this trend has been positive. The reasons for this are as follows.
First of all, it is evident that exposure to a significant amount of bad news could bring a sense of living in a problematic and difficult era. Placing the least emphasis on broadcasting good news, published news revolves around terrible incidents such as wars, earthquakes, or fires. This makes audiences expect the occurrence of such unappealing incidents in their cities, resulting in their depression and other suffering feelings. According to a psychological principle, permanent exposure to negative news increases the chance of affliction with mental diseases by 40%. Furthermore, negative news has a tendency to last for a long time in humans’ minds, making them distracted during work or study times. Such news, therefore, has the potential to reduce individuals’ productivity and efficiency at work or make them mentally disordered. Despite this, they have also been beneficial.
On the other hand, however, publishing horrible news also could bring tremendous advantages to human life. Witnessing other people in a distressing situation through such influential reports makes some watchers come up with novel ideas to meet their peers’ needs, resulting in the alleviation of the challenges those people are struggling with. A salient example of this is the earthquake in Bam in 2001, which cost many survivors their lives due to the lack of equipment and technology to recognize and rescue them from beneath the debris. This report made scientists invent a machine sensitive to thermal radiation to find survivors in similar incidents. So, it can be concluded that many inventions in the world originate from shocking news.
By way of conclusion, I once again reaffirm my position that although releasing negative news could have heart-rending effects, such news has caused technological breakthroughs. Nonetheless, I think sensitive people should avoid seeing horrible reports.