"The muddy relationship between audience-optimised publishing and public understanding has long been apparent in the case of crime. The pursuit of William Randolph Hearst's maxim that "if it bleeds, it leads" has led us to a perverse situation where someone's perception of crime is driven more by news reports than by their own experiences or those of people they know. It is now the norm for people to believe crime is rising when it is falling, and people's life satisfaction is based more on their perceptions of crime than on actual crime.
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The research tells us several things. First, there is far more news coverage of prices when they are high than low. If it exceeds, it leads, you might say. Second, the price at which this negative coverage takes off has been falling steadily lower in real terms - making negative headlines more and more likely even for the same level of affordability. And crucially, third, the switch into bad-news-about-prices mode happens much more abruptly on subscription-based cable news channels - where the incentives to keep the viewer glued to the screen are strongest - than on network television.
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And unfortunately, none of this is likely to change. A recent paper in Nature found that the more negative a headline, the more people will click on it, and anyone who has spent time on social media - now the primary source of news for a growing portion of people - will know the same dynamics apply there. From news organisations to TikTokers, everyone is now optimising for engagement, and that means we hear more about the bad than the good."
Trechos retirados de "How our sense of economic reality is being distorted"
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