It’s time to address the elephant in the (news) room

In my last column of the year, I’d like to address an existential question that journalists have faced for long: Why does bad news dominate headlines? And before discerning readers start chiding local journalism for its negativity, allow me to note that this trend isn’t country or region specific. It’s global. It’s also platform agnostic — the propensity to highlight bad news is as prevalent in print as it is on digital channels, including social media.

Now, it isn’t that good news is not strong enough or has a lesser impact, but even the harshest of critics of the media will agree that a sudden negative event — an accident, a terror attack, a natural disaster — holds far more exigence than, say, a gradually improving economy or the collective efforts of a community to turn their surroundings green. Several studies and research papers have demonstrated what journalists have known all along: bad news sells. Negative words elicit a far greater and faster response in us humans than positive words. In fact, psychologists have a term for it: negativity bias. In simple terms, it means that our brains are mapped in a way that helps us grasp and retain things of negative, unpleasant nature with far greater sensitivity and in lower reaction time than positive and pleasant news.

It doesn’t, however, mean that we have to necessarily continue feeding that bias at the expense of good news. Which is why Khaleej

Times took the call quite early on to keep negativity at a bare minimum in our reportage and focus on the bright and cheerful as much as possible. We are perhaps the only newspaper in the world to have a Happiness Editor on our rolls. And while we cannot, unfortunately, change the nature of the events of the day, we can at least help you start the day on a positive note. Here’s wishing you a Happy News Year.