Replying to Why Does Society Pay Attention To The Bad News Rather Than The Good News?

This is kind of random, but I thought I would get NS's perspective on this. It was brought to my attention through a post that I read on Facebook and it really got me thinking. I figured it would interest some of you on here so I had to make a thread about it.

Do you ever wonder why most of the news we hear is about murder, corruption, theft, etc... The cliche the media uses is, "if it bleeds it leads." Why thats a cliche though is an interesting thing to think about. There has to be some psychological reason as to why people are generally more attracted to the bad news rather than the good news.

I personally think its because we unconsciously like to compare our own lives to the lives in the bad news. We think that since we wouldn't ever do anything bad enough to make the headlines than that must mean we are morally good human beings in return. In reality though, that mentality is really just a cop out used to forget about our own personal flaws. People use the bad news to justify their own imperfections.

Thats why I think we as a society are more attentive towards the bad news rather than the good. The good news in a sense makes us feel bad about ourselves. So instead of feeling bad about who we are, our basic human instinct is to turn to the opposite so we can instead feel good about ourselves.