I'm not a big fan of the evening news, the Weather Channel, and other such programs mainly because of the all the doomin' and gloomin' that takes place in their programming. Global warming! Terrorism! The end of low energy prices! Killer asteroids! Bird flu! The return of Duran Duran! Are things all that bad, or is programming biased? This fella says that reporting is biased and the reason is because of the market for broadcasts and because of how our brains have developed to operate (HT to The Door for the list from which the essay came).
The problem starts with a deep human psychological response. We're wired to react more strongly to dramatic stories than to abstract facts. There are obvious historical and Darwinian reasons why this should be so. The news that an invader has just set fire to a hut in your village demands immediate response. The genes for equanimity in such circumstances got burned up long ago.
Although our village is now global, we still instinctively react the same way. Spectacle, death and gore. We lap it up. Layer on top of that a media economy that's driven by competition for attention and the problem is magnified. Over the years media owners have proven to their complete satisfaction that the stories that attract large audiences are the simple human dramas. Rottweiler Savages Baby is a bigger story than Poverty Percentage Falls even though the latter is a story about better lives for millions.
Good news is no news, and now we know why.