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It’s true that people want good news more than they want bad news. And yet, the media feeds us a steady diet of bad news.

Of course, it’s also true that people are more likely to engage with a bad news. We seem to want it more.

This paradox of wanting good news but acting like we want bad news is based on our psychology. Particularly the way our lizard brain reacts to threatening stimuli.

The real question is why we continue to insist that the behavior matches a “truer” desire. That compulsive reaction to the bad news is what we actually want.

Well, we don’t actually believe that. At least, we don’t intend to think that.

With media, we base the idea of want on consumption. So, the experts suggest, we obviously want bad news. Similarly, we obviously don’t want good news. Or else, that’s what we’d consume. And when we’re fed good news, we usually don’t consume it.

We’re using a circular argument.

We define what is news with a circular, self-fulfilling argument.

We say that something is news, not because it is a valuable thing to know about, but based almost entirely on whether or not we will consume it.

And since they know “if it bleeds, it leads,” which sells more proverbial papers, we are using a different metric to define, not just newsworthiness, but the very concept of news itself.

Consumption.

We are fundamentally mixing up sales with journalism.

The question stopped being about what news departments need to do to keep themselves afloat as businesses. We’re defining what counts as news according to what they think we’ll consume, not on its intrinsic worth.

In other words, they’re feeding us Hot Pockets 24/7. And the fact that we’re more inclined to eat that than a salad is leading us to define “food” as Hot Pockets and not salad.

So all the news they offer up gets to be defined as news. And all the stuff we’re ignoring…is, by this circular definition, not.

We’re now defining news as “bad stuff happening”.

Of course, experts aren’t likely to acknowledge that we commonly define news itself as the bad stuff happening all around us. And good news is “feel good” and presented as a “puff piece”. And yet they can’t help but turn to arguments about market forces.

Even as those market forces reflect addictive behaviors toward things which aren’t good for us. Like eating unhealthy food or consuming unhealthy media.

Similarly, we aren’t defining news by its ability to cover long-term situations. Nor how it can help us understand complex ideas. We choose to define news as urgent, immediate, and narrow.

There is little wonder why the Facebook algorithm serves us articles and posts that fuel our outrage. Because we engage with it.

And the most important thing to recognize is that we aren’t doing this because we want to. They simply know we will.

To put it another way, they are manipulating us. Shoving in front of our eyeballs what they know will catch our attention and lead us to share with other people. Can you believe what they did!

Let’s not confuse this with news. Any more than Hot Pockets are the definition of food.

We aren’t stuck with this.

We’re presently defining news this way. Like junk food’s the only option.

We don’t have to, of course. We’re choosing to. Choosing to define news this way, desire this way, and defend news agencies for feeding us junk food rather than healthy food.

We can also choose to stop.

That’s going to take effort. Personally and collectively. Enhancing our news literacy, so we know what we are looking at. And making choices to engage with media that informs more than it outrages.

But it is worth the doing. And it’s worth demanding more actual news from the media.