Shawn Vestal: Consumers drive demand for bad news, study finds

There’s an old journalism cliché about the primacy of bad news: We cover crashes, not landings.

The logic of this has always seemed sound to me. Crashes are unusual; landings are commonplace. Crashes are life-changing; landings are routine. Crashes are problems, and a free, self-governing people need to know about problems.

Obviously, this is my self-interested journalist’s view of it. A disinterested observer – one more inclined to decry the preponderance of “bad news” – might conclude that going negative is simply the way to sell papers or attract viewers. If that’s so, it says as much about readers and viewers as the media.

A new paper co-authored by a Washington State University economics professor presents a model that attempts to measure the value of bad and good news to a reader, and to consider the influence that has on editorial choices. In short, the paper concludes that readers have good reason to pay attention to “crashes” over “landings,” and that this creates a societal preference to which that news corporations respond to make more money – which might distort public opinion and indirectly cause “personal problems” like depression.

“In this perspective, the result of this paper is somewhat paradoxical in that it is media consumer preferences themselves which may be the prime cause of the bias in mass media reporting toward negative coverage,” the paper concludes.

Jill McCluskey, professor of economics at WSU, said the paper, which was published in the journal Information Economics and Policy, is one of the first efforts to evaluate the “demand” side of the negative news question. It’s titled “You get what you want: A note on the economics of bad news.” Other economists have looked at the question in terms of ideological bias, commercial objectives and competitive pressure among journalists.

“We argue it’s demand-driven,” McCluskey said Tuesday. “People actually want to read bad news because it helps them in their lives.”

Because it is an economics paper, it focuses on economic measures of well-being and utility, and not news values or journalistic principle or reader ideology. “Economists think everything is economics,” McCluskey joked.

A key principle she and her colleagues used in developing their research model is the economic law of “diminishing marginal utility” – the more of something you have, the less impact any additional unit of that thing has on your life. She offered income as an example: Your first $1,000 will help you survive. But your 101st thousand dollars are not going to have a huge influence on your life and well-being.

And so we become more sensitive to losses than gains. In the paper on bad news, the researchers used measures of utility – overall happiness and well-being – and calculated how much benefit readers received from reading either good or bad news. They concluded there was a greater individual benefit from reading the bad news because it can help individuals avoid risk.

“Profit-maximizing media companies respond to this difference in demand by supplying more bad news than good news,” the paper said.

There are downsides, of course. People are often more pessimistic about things than the real world warrants. The media often overhype stories about risk and danger at home (while often ignoring much more severe problems around the world). Remember Ebola? That disease killed more than 10,000 people in West Africa with the typical Western response – in the media and among the public – of a shrug. When it came here, briefly and mostly unthreateningly, there was a baseless surge of paranoia, driven by certain parts of the media.

“People were really worried when it came to the U.S. even though the probability of any of us getting it was infinitesimal,” McCluskey said.

One of McCluskey’s colleagues in Belgium, Johan Swinnen, has an upcoming paper examining the bad-news bias in coverage of economic issues. This is of particular interest to some in politics and economics because lots of people have negative views of the economy that are out of balance with the facts. That paper looked at one major German newspaper’s coverage of job losses versus gains between 2000 and 2008.

“Despite the fact that the economic situation in Germany improved over the period, more than ten times as many articles report on negative employment news compared to positive news,” the paper concludes. “On a per-job basis, the slant to downsizing even amounts to a factor greater than 20.”