As usual, the results are positive only if your story happens to have whatever peculiar mix of characteristics make it get picked up by the media. Especially with the advent of crowdfunding, a person who's been wronged and whose story goes viral very often ends up "net positive" (e.g. the old lady chaperoning a bus who was verbally abused by her students and ended up having strangers send her almost half a million dollars.

The far more important subtext (and the reason that most of these stories take off) is that they are often indicative of larger phenomena. Most kids facing racism or having their creativity stifled by their schools _don't_ have their stories blow up and so their stories are nothing but "net negative".