Watch the news, almost any night, or read the newspaper almost any day, and you will be bombarded by bad news. Inevitably I hear people turn from the news and say, "Why can't they cover good news. Why do they have to cover murders, rapes, fires, war, and economic crisis all the time?"
Of course, the fault is in us. We, as thinking, human beings, as Homo sapiens, tend to note the negative more than the positive. You've all had someone put a dot in the center of a page and then hold it up and ask what you see. Almost everyone will say a dot. But there was far more blank paper than there was dot.
If there is a car accident, inevitably, the cars passing the crash site will slow down, just a little, which slows the person behind a little more, and finally you have this creeping line of rubber-neck creeps looking to see what happened. If the car was parked in that spot instead of being crumpled and surrounded by fire and rescue personnel, hardly anyone would have slowed to look.
There are, of course, some Good News stories covered on TV and in the press. It is usually something like a homeless man finds a bag filled with $300,000 that fell off an Armored Truck and the homeless guy turns the money in, and we go wow, that's really something. I remember a store where this woman went to her car after shopping for groceries, put her baby in it's infant seat, on top of the car, loaded her bags into the car, got in the car, started it up, and started driving off forgetting that the baby was still sitting in its car seat carrier precariously balanced on the roof of the car. An alert bag boy runs after the car, the car seat slides off the roof, and the bag boy manages to catch the baby in mid-air, saving the baby from harm and potential death. Wow! That is good news. Both examples are unusual examples of goodness, or at least good luck.
But our natural tendency to want to look at the burning building or the injured child is not enough to make it good for the news to be bad. I have, what I believe is a much better reason why we should all support and root for bad stuff to make up the majority of our news, and here is my reason.
Unusual stuff is news worthy stuff. As long as the news is mostly bad, it means bad is still unusual. More good stuff is going on than bad stuff. If doing good stuff because so odd, so unusual, so shocking that it becomes news worthy, that would mean that bad stuff was so common, that bad stuff happened so often, that crimes and cruelty were so usual that it was no longer different enough to make the news.
As long as the news is bad, you can breathe a sigh of relief and thank God, or your lucky stars and know that there is still more good going on in the world than bad, and that is good news!
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