Opinion

KLAVAN: Good News Is No News

   DailyWire.com
Copies of the New York Times sit for sale in a rack July 23, 2008 in New York City. The New York broadsheet announced it posted an 82 percent decline in second quarter profits as compared to last year.
Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

After a long lifetime of following the news, I can’t help being struck by how good it all is. Stock market soaring, jobs abundant, shoppers with money to spend. The Saturday before Christmas was the country’s best retail day ever, as in ever. And, while journalists and other Democrats continually predict disaster overseas, the ISIS caliphate has been erased, terrorists are being blown up, and trade deals are being made without a major war or depression in sight.

Sure, there are the usual crises, tragedies, and long-term problems in the offing – we ain’t in heaven yet. Still, here in this corner of the earth, life seems unusually good.

And not just here either. In a much-noticed article in the British Spectator, Matt Ridley declared the 2010’s the best decade in human history. Twenty-eight percent of all the wealth ever created was created in the last ten years. Extreme poverty around the world was halved. Child mortality was reduced by a third. Life expectancy went up. Use of resources went down. The number of free countries: up. The number of deaths from pollution and weather: down. In the immortal words of Titothe Cat: If this is torture, chain me to the wall.

But while all this good news managed to break through during the slow Christmas season, don’t count on seeing too much of it. The old expression “If it bleed, it leads” is not just journalistic cynicism, it’s a response to human nature. Because good news is temporary, but death is permanent, we’ve evolved to pay close attention to threats and danger.

The science guys call this “negativity bias.” As John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister recently explained in the Wall Street Journal: “bad health or bad parenting makes much more difference than good health or good parenting. A negative image stimulates more electrical activity in the brain than does a positive image. The pain of criticism is much stronger than the pleasure of praise. A single bad event can produce lifelong trauma, but there is no psychological term for the opposite of trauma because no good event has such a lasting impact. Or as the great sportscaster Vin Scully put it: “Losing feels worse than winning feels good.”

This means that good news is no news. It’s bad business. John Fund points out in a piece for the Fox News website: In 2014, the Russian news site City Reporter decided to cover only good news and silver linings for an entire day. It lost two-thirds of its normal readership that day. When I was growing up in California, a businessman in my hometown launched The Good News, an unrelentingly cheerful weekly paper that found subscribers in 50 states and 10 countries. But it went broke in 16 months.

Still, when it suits their relentlessly left-wing bias, our mainstream news media can overcome good business practice. We all remember how the scandal-ridden Obama administration was “scandal free” to the media, and how eight years of sluggish growth and low-paying part-time jobs was reported as if it were some kind of economic miracle.

But when Republicans are in power, screw that, every day’s a disaster. Anyone who watches network news or reads the New York Times these days would think we were living in the End Times.

“Why is America So Depressed?” asks writer Lee Siegel in a Times op-ed. Commenting on the shocking rise in American depression and suicide over the last ten years, Siegel writes, “this mental carnage is occurring at a time when decades of social and political division have set against each other black and white, men and women, old and young. Beyond bitter social antagonisms, the country is racked by mass shootings, the mind-bending perils of the internet, revelations of widespread sexual predation, the worsening effects of climate change, virulent competition, the specter of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, grinding student debt and crises in housing, health care and higher education.

The question is: if one stopped reading the New York Times, how many of these problems would instantly improve or simply disappear? Will the decade of American depression and suicide – which occurred in tandem with all the global good news – continue now that President the Donald has put America First and turned the sluggish Obama economy around?

If Americans start to cheer up over the next year or so, we will have cause to wonder if America’s suicidal funk was simply the result of eight years of incompetent Democrat governance, Obama anti-Americanism, and the smiley-face lies of a collusive press.

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