When watching or reading the news, it often feels that the world is full of bad news. I decided to see whether it’s just an illusion and took as source material today’s newspaper and, in particular, the foreign news section.
I then classified each news item (i.e. opinions or columns don’t count as news) according to whether it was negative, positive or neutral in tone. For example, “Anti-Denmark hostility intensifies in several Arab countries” counts as negative, “A new annual day to commemorate end of slavery in France” counts as positive while articles like “President Bush’s State of the Union speech opens the election year in USA” were counted towards neutral items.
The results from this highly unscientific study can be seen in the graph below:
Green is positive, red is negative and light blue is the neutral share of the articles.
As can be seen, most news are somewhat surprisingly neutral. But still, bad news significantly outnumber the good news. So what does this tell us? While I’m sure there are plenty of bad news to go around, I’d be willing to bet there are more good news to go around, too. We’re constantly told, complacency is dangerours (and, thus, bad news have their time and place), but so are desperation and feelings of hopelessness which spring from unending flow of purely bad news.
So, newspapers: instead of reporting torrents of bad news which eventually cause people to throw in the towel, why not try to activate and organize some positive action? Try to make some news, not just report them. Oh, and lame discussion forums with hints like “Discuss the article at www.blahblah.com” are not the way to do this.
