The old phrase “good news is no news. Bad news is great news” has never rung more true then in the media today. Negative stories from Iraq, product recalls and biological scares plague media outlets such as CNN. The media has grown into using negative stories and scare tactics to gain ratings but this has also caused a numbness and fear among the viewers.
What is the best way to determine if the news is negative? Ask the people of course. While the Internet contains many opposing and critical views it is hard to argue with people such as Amy Proctor. Amy (who is a staunch conservative) created a video which went through many seemingly positive news stories presented by CNN and revealed how the network put a negative spin on them. A story about fewer casualties in Iraq is marred with questions such as “this a turning point or just the lull before another storm?” and “So is this real progress or is it just a mirage?” Now questioning incoming information is fair but CNN continues to say, “one month's data is not evidence for a dramatic trend or turning point of any kind. We are paying them handsomely in hard cash not to shoot at us” and expands downplaying the good news claiming that the data should be taken with a grain of salt. Instead of playing the importance of fewer deaths CNN says that things could change and warns of incoming problems that might arise. To look beyond the Iraq war we can still see the negative media’s exaggeration and growth. In 2001 the media outlets declared "summer of the shark." The actual truth was “that [shark] attacks were down in 2001. There were 50 compared to 52 the year before.” Media outlets also proclaimed it the "summer of abduction", 2005 brought up the West Nile Virus scare, and the Flu Scare in 2006. Airing stories such as these are more scare tactics then anything else, they exaggerate details in order to being an overarching problem that can be retold over months of time. The West Nile virus media event in West Virginia is a fantastic example of how the media uses events to cause a national uproar. Media groups reported that the West Nile Virus was a serious health threat but the Centers of Disease Control reports from their West Nile homepage that “Approximately 80 percent of people (about 4 out of 5) who are infected with WNV will not show any symptoms at all.” And only “About one in 150 (.6%) people infected with WNV will develop severe illness.” It is relatively clear that the media takes stories from world events such as the War in Iraq and puts a negative spin on them but also creates stories, which might not have been there otherwise, causing scares in the general public.
But the question remains of why media sources would choose to create fear for their viewers and why put a negative spin on positive stories. The answer to this lies in the history of cable news and the power of fear. The first twenty-four hour news network was the Cable News Network (CNN) which was founded on June 1, 1980. CNN brought a whole new world of news reporting with up to the minute updates and gained popularity from events such as the Gulf War and the Black Hawk Down event in which CNN was able to report news much more quickly then any other source. The problem with this style of news reporting was that reporting the same old stories would no longer get the attention of the viewers and stories started to become more and more grisly. This eventually caused a phenomenon, which seems to have numbed the viewers of news to horrible events. When the people stop caring about the horrible stories they see on the news people tend to stop watching. This creates a problem for the networks as they rely on viewers to keep on watching the stories so a popular tactic used to promote a story is fear. Fear is a survival mechanism that is tied to anxiety and distress. To invoke such an emotion in people will at least get them to pay attention to what one is saying. David Altheide, a professor at the School of Justice at Arizona State University followed the word “fear” and discovered that it “seems to pop up right next to a couple other words: children and schools.” News networks cause fear in parents that maybe a shooting might occur in your children’s school or lead pipes might be poisoning your kids. These sorts of stories force parents to listen because of the worry it causes them. Because of the numbing effect of violent and negative news in the media, these companies have resorted to using fear and other negative tactics to shock the viewers into watching.
It is easy to blame CNN and the other media networks for airing depressing and negative material. From spinning positive news in Iraq into forecasts of doom or how “national murder rate fell by 20 percent.” In 1990 “But the number of murder stories on network newscasts rose roughly 600 percent” it is easy to see why people have become numb to the media. But the problem still remains on how much we, as the people still want to hear about the bad news. Would we watch a Reuters News Network that aired news with no spin or would we want to see the gloom and doom of current broadcast news? It is human nature to want to watch the horrible car crash while driving by and people still want to hear about the bad news around the world but as time goes on the media reaches new heights (or lows) in the way it reports news.
