I suspect discussing knowledge of the news is some kind of social signaling.
What I'm getting at is that the premise that news is mostly negative seems to pretty clearly dictate that we would be better off without most news. Yet this seems to contradict a pretty wildly held belief that getting rid of news is troubling.
Ie, you will be looked down on in some circles if you are not aware of what is going on. Knowing what someone else doesn't know is a way of being better than them. Or signalling that you are better than them.
It's not usually as overt as this, but it's there.
A few examples; the Titanic was never called unsinkable until after it sank, no one committed suicide on Black Friday as a result of the stock market crash, and there was no public panic caused by the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast. All of these things were reported by the media at the time.
Think of the stories you see day to day and imagine in 100 years if these are the go-to source for information about our time how skewed a picture you would have of how things actually were.
These examples are more "sensational" than negative, but it is essentially the same idea.
And setting the record straight, where "straight" is whatever the powers-that-be want.
We even have an age old saying for this: History is written by the victors.
Historical records, and by extension journalism, have never been concerned about recording the facts. They have always been concerned only about defining the narratives and truths for the powers of the time.
Why should I believe you, a random person on the Internet?
I think you’re close. There was a lot less repetition of news. Now the need to fill endless hours with content means stories are repeated ad nauseam. Keep in mind that repetition is known and used as a torture technique. “Repetition is an important neural linguistic programming interrogation tactic to influence the target mind” [0].
[0] https://neuralguantanamo.com/no-touch-torture-techniques/
It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago.
Its much more efficient to have the knowledge of statistically improbable but bad actions to avoid, rather to have a set of good actions where you don't know where the boundaries are.
Lets say that you had to walk through a minefield with a set number of mines. You could pay me $10 for a piece of information. I can either tell you a spot with a mine, or a spot without one. How do you spend your money?
This isn't an argument against the free press or anything. As bad as bias and fearmongering in news is, adding government oversight would make it way worse. It's just a thought experiment.
To elaborate, if news is inherently skewed towards negativity (and I'm just taking that at face value), then maybe it shouldn't be revered as much as it is (by my estimation). I think people tend to think that news is sacred - more is better and it should face no challenges to its existence. But I also think we find ourselves in a predicament that we don't associate with times where news consisted of a daily paper and perhaps the radio. I'm not sure those times were any less prone to bias an negativity. The bigger difference is there was just a lot less news. Maybe the world would be better off with less news.
I'm not really sure what sort of attitude change or direction this would dictate. Like I said, it would be terrible for the government to limit news, and this negativity exists because there is strong demand for it. I guess I think people just shouldn't watch the news much, with some exception. I mean if you look at cable for example, it's virtually all garbage.