Making good news bad

Media constantly make decisions on which stories they tell. And they have different ways of telling these stories. As all of us know, in the end, the outcome is mostly negative. Bad news sells, they say. I don’t believe in that because I meet too many people who tell me that they are skipping the news broadcasts or the front pages because they can no longer bear the daily onslaught of disasters, fraud and violence. It’s not right either. As much as there is good and bad in the world, in most of our lives most of the times more goes right than wrong. But that’s not the reality that the media tend to report on. They hardly see success, only failure. Interestingly enough: even if a story is basically positive, they tend to focus on the negative.

Here’s a prime example. This Saturday The New York Times reported on the first business page on how the current economic crisis is affecting the sales of organic food. Under the headline “Pure and Simple Economics” the Times wrote: “Budgets squeezed some families bypass high-priced organics”. A graph with a nice falling line completed the presentation.

I did my own little bit of research with this story and showed to a doze people or so. I just asked them to read the headlines and the graph and tell me what they understood. All of them said the same: the current economic climate is making the sales of organic food go down. Or: bad news for the organic industry.

Wrong. On a closer look the story appears to be very different. The organic food business is still growing. Only the rate of growth has slowed down. So there is basically good news here. Despite the economic downturn month over month more people decide to boy organic products. However the growth of that growth has slowed down. Hence the falling line in the graph. And the “families” that “bypass high-priced organics” are not the regular customers, who keep buying organic, but these are the potential new customers that there are now less of. In other words: the organic food industry is a sector where things are actually going quite well considering the circumstances. Dealing with less growth is something that many of us would be quite content with these days.

This is a perfect example of a newspaper unnecessarily tweaking news in a negative direction. It happens all the time. The news has to be bad otherwise it is no news. Media always praise their so-called “objectivity”. Nice words that don’t match reality. Most media don’t want to see things going right. It’s sad. But it is comforting to know that, whatever they see, it’s not reality.