It is often argued that the trend in the media of covering more bad news and emergencies rather than focusing on positive developments has negative effects on individuals and society wholly. I strongly agree with this idea.
Excessive exposure to negative news can have harmful effects on mental health and mindset. This trend can make people consume constant news about disasters, crime, and war every day, causing chronic anxiety and increased stress levels. After some time, this can shift individuals’ paradigm to the idea that the world is unsafe. For example, people scrolling through disaster news before work are highly likely to feel stress and experience low productivity during the day. In the long term, this can develop learned helplessness, making people believe that their attempts to solve problems are ineffective. To illustrate, most citizens have started ignoring climate change campaigns because news reports only focus on inescapable doom.
As far as society as whole is concerned, the affects of news channels highlighting conflicts and disasters to amess sizeable viewers are more significant. In the short term, this can lead to distrust among different communities and fear each other and this might actually weaken the overall well-being in the society. In the long term, this can destroy social unity and increase hostility slowing down community cooperation. Most of the positive news namely scientific progress, local charity, and declining poverty is ignored because of the preference of media to cover the negative news. As a result, people lose trust in institutions and fail to celebrate
real human achievements. To illuminate, media is neglecting massive improvement in renewable energy technology while focusing on the energy crises.
To sum up, media preference towards negative news has significant negative effect on both individuals and society as whole and I strongly agree with this idea. I am convinced that the media should try to balance their reporting.