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Increasing Incidence of Bad News

HAVE you ever noticed that headlines proclaiming bad news awaken more reader interest than those conveying good news? Whether it is a newspaper headline of a natural disaster or some scintillating gossip splashed on the front cover of a glossy magazine, it seems that bad news sells better than good news.

Today there is no shortage of bad news. But one sometimes wonders whether bad news is what reporters and journalists are trained to look for and ferret out—to the exclusion of any good news.

Plentiful Throughout History

Indeed, bad news has been plentiful throughout the centuries, outweighing any good news. In the annals of history, the scales are heavily tipped toward human suffering, disappointment, and despair, which have been mankind’s lot.

Let us consider just a few examples. The book Chronicle of the World, devised by Jacques Legrand, sets out a collection of stories, each written for the particular date on which the event happened but as if it were being told by a modern journalist reporting the event. From these well-researched reports, we get a bird’s-eye view of the widespread bad news that man has heard throughout his troubled existence here on planet Earth.

First, consider this early report from Greece in 429 B.C.E. It is covering the war then being waged between Athens and Sparta: “The city-state of Potidaea has been forced to surrender to the besieging Athenians after being reduced to such a state of hunger that its people have been eating the bodies of their dead.” Bad news indeed!

Moving on to the first century before our Common Era, we find a graphic report of the death of Julius Caesar, datelined Rome, March 15, 44 B.C. “Julius Caesar has been assassinated. He was stabbed to death by a group of conspirators, some of them his closest friends, as he took his seat in the Senate House today, the Ides of March.”

During the centuries that followed, bad news continued to abound. One shocking example is this news from Mexico in 1487: “In the most spectacular sacrificial display ever seen in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, 20,000 people have lost their hearts to Huitzilopochtli, the war god.”

Not only has man’s cruelty provided bad news but his carelessness has added to the long list. The great fire of London seems to have been one such disaster. The report from London, England, dated September 5, 1666, reads: “At last, after four days and nights, the fire of London has been halted by the duke of York, who brought in naval gunpowder teams to blow up buildings in the path of the flames. Some 400 acres [160 ha] have been razed with 87 churches and over 13,000 houses destroyed. Miraculously, only nine lives were lost.”

We must add to these examples of bad news the epidemics that have raged through many continents—for example, the cholera epidemic of the early 1830’s. The printed heading reporting this reads: “The spectre of cholera haunts Europe.” The realistic report that follows depicts bad news at its frightening worst: “Cholera, unknown in Europe until 1817, is spreading westwards from Asia. Already Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg have had their populations decimated—the majority of the victims from the urban poor.”

Escalation in Recent Years

So while it is true that bad news has been a fact of life throughout recorded history, recent decades of this 20th century give evidence that bad news is on the increase, indeed it is escalating rapidly.

Undoubtedly, war news has been the worst kind of bad news our present century has heard. The two greatest wars in history—aptly called World War I and World War II—certainly saw bad news reported on a horrendous scale. But that really has only been a fraction of the bad news this unhappy century has furnished.

Consider just a few headlines selected at random:

September 1, 1923: Quake razes Tokyo—300,000 dead; September 20, 1931: Crisis—Britain devalues the pound; June 25, 1950: North Korea marches into the South; October 26, 1956: Hungarians rise against Soviet rule; November 22, 1963: John Kennedy is shot dead in Dallas; August 21, 1968: Russian tanks roll in to crush the Prague uprising; September 12, 1970: Hijacked jets blown up in the desert; December 25, 1974: Cyclone Tracy flattens Darwin—66 die; April 17, 1975: Cambodia falls to Communist forces; November 18, 1978: Mass suicide in Guyana; October 31, 1984: Mrs. Gandhi shot dead; January 28, 1986: Space shuttle explodes on takeoff; April 26, 1986: Soviet reactor is on fire; October 19, 1987: Bottom falls out of the stock market; March 25, 1989: Alaska hit by oil spill; June 4, 1989: Troops massacre protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Yes, history shows that bad news has always been plentiful, while good news has been comparatively scarce. As bad news has escalated in recent decades, good news has diminished as each year goes by.

Why should this be? Will it always be so?

The next article will address these two questions.

[Picture Credit Line on page 3]

WHO/League of Red Cross