We’re all drawn to bad news. Here’s how to fight it.

Welcome to the first edition of Good News, the weekly newsletter dedicated to covering the remarkable, optimistic things happening all around us. Now, I know what you might be thinking: “Good news? In today’s environment? Has the author recently suffered a head injury?” So let’s state this at the outset: While my brain is currently intact, there is a lot of bad stuff happening. There’s continued conflict in Ukraine, where the war has now lasted for more than 1,100 days, while the tenuous ceasefire in Gaza could be near collapse. Global democracy is apparently in worse shape now than at any time over the past two decades. Thousands of foreign aid projects have been effectively terminated, with catastrophic consequences for millions of the poorest people in the world. The US just experienced its first measles death in years, as an outbreak spreads through scores of people in Texas amid a decline in vaccination. Jobless claims rose and consumer spending fell as worries about the economy continue to grow. Oh, and climate change is worsening even as clean energy policies are dismantled, while deforestation in the vital South American country of Colombia grew by 35 percent in 2024. And that’s just a sampling of headlines from the past few days. So why launch a newsletter dedicated to good news when the news seems worse than it’s ever been? Because even amid the blizzard of bad, good news is happening all around us — we just can’t see it. We’re so stuck in the present that we fail to understand just how much life has improved over the medium and long term. Take the headlines above. Yes, there is war happening around us, and conflict really has worsened in recent years, as shown by Ukraine and other fronts. But international conflict used to be far more common and orders of magnitude more deadly than it is today. Stories of battles and casualties in one place can cause us to miss more hopeful stories elsewhere: Did you know a decades-old insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey may finally be on the brink of ending? The health of democracy at home and abroad is discouraging, to say the least, given recent developments. But we should remember how novel representative government is — as recently as 1950, fewer than 15 percent of countries were considered democracies of any kind, and less than 6 percent qualified as true liberal democracies. Go back much further than that, and they were virtually nonexistent. That puts our current troubles in a very different context. Americans have tremendous anxiety about their economic prospects. But economic fundamentals like unemployment remain far better than they’ve been for most of recent history; the long-term story is one of material improvement in the US and elsewhere. (As Charles C. Mann titled an excellent essay recently on progress, compared to even the richest people of the past, who lacked comforts now taken for granted, “we live like royalty and we don’t even know it.”) I haven’t even mentioned the constant stream of scientific discoveries and innovations that arrive almost daily, especially in medicine. A new encyclopedia of protein-coding genes; a mathematical model that could help revive coral reefs; a better way to deliver gene editing therapies; the first fetus to receive life-saving medication before birth. All of this, too, has happened over just the past few days. Chances are, you just didn’t hear about it. All of which raises the question: Why aren’t you hearing about it? I can think of three reasons. The media has a bad news bias I’ve spent nearly 25 years as a professional journalist. So I feel I have some authority when I tell you that the media really does have a notable bias. However, it’s not for Democrats or Republicans, neoliberalism or progressive economics, woke or not woke. It’s a bias for bad news. As my colleague over here at Future Perfect Dylan Matthews wrote a few years ago, there’s a large body of academic research that concludes that the news we read, watch, and listen to tends to have a negative bent. One 2022 study found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness” grew notably in the US between 2000 and 2019. Putting on my journalist hat with the tag reading “PRESS” sticking out of the band, I can tell you that this tracks with my experience. Something going wrong is inherently more newsworthy than something going right. For example: The fact that 3 million people flew in and out of US airports and none of them died in an accident isn’t news, while a single crash most definitely is, even though you are far more likely to be in the first group than the second. (I mean way more likely — based on data between 2010 and 2024, there were only one or two passenger fatalities on regularly scheduled flights per light-year traveled. That’s nearly 5.9 trillion miles.) There are very good reasons journalists have this bad news bias. One of the most important functions of the press is as a watchdog — and a watchdog barks when something is amiss. We in the media should keep doing this. But it does distract us from the stories of things simply working and the slower-moving stories of real progress. (Here’s one: Between 2000 and 2022, the child mortality rate globally fell by more than half, which translates to millions of children living who would otherwise be dead. As a parent myself of a young child, I cannot imagine a better story than that.) The problem for the news audience is that all that watchdog barking means that we can end up with a view of the world that is far bleaker than it actually is. And all of you play a part in that because … The audience has a bad news bias It’s been a long time since I took Econ 101, and as I recall I got a B. But I do remember the concept of supply and demand. If the media’s natural bad news bias is the supply, then the audience’s inclination toward consuming all that bad news is the demand. And boy, do we love it! In Dylan’s story that I mentioned in the previous section, he wrote about a fascinating 17-country study that tried to measure how people reacted to positive- and negative-seeming news by watching “seven randomly ordered BBC World News stories in a laptop computer while wearing noise-cancelling headphones and sensors on their fingers to capture skin conductance and blood volume pulse.” (Basically my usual Friday night.) The researchers found that negative news led to stronger physiological reactions and grabbed more attention than positive or normal news on average. One study in Nature found that people were 1 percent less likely to click on a headline for each positive word in the headline. Of course, social media, with its unerring ability to optimize our feeds for outrage, has only amplified that tendency. Think about the last story you shared on social media, or in a group chat with friends. Chances are, it was a negative one. And part of the reason we are so attracted to negative news is … Our brains have a bad news bias Here’s something you should know about me. Like 21 million other Americans, I suffer from depression. Thankfully, I’ve been able to manage that condition with regular talk therapy and medication. But I still notice the way that depressive tendencies color my outlook. I feel the pull of pessimism, an inclination toward the negative, a penchant for seeing the worst in things. When I share these feelings with my therapist, he has a ready saying: “Your mind is not being a good friend to you.” What he means is that my melancholy, if we want to get 19th century about it, causes me to see the world, and myself, as darker than it is in reality. In other words, I have a bad news bias. You don’t have to suffer from depression for this to happen to you. What’s known as “negativity bias” is one of the most well-established findings in psychology. As one paper put it, when it comes to the human mind, “bad is stronger than good.” It’s a fact of human nature that predates social media, the media, maybe even civilization itself. It is a product of evolution. Early human beings who couldn’t reliably identify and respond to threats probably didn’t last very long on the savannah, which made this bias a useful adaptation — even if it meant we weren’t seeing the world the way it really was. Today, though, most of humanity — and definitely most of the people reading this piece — are thankfully no longer in a position where we’re facing threats to life and limb on a regular basis. Chances are we’re pretty comfortable most of the time, about as secure as human beings have ever been. But the worry and the negativity don’t go away just because the world has gotten safer in aggregate. If we’re to see the world as it really is, with its true mix of bad and good, we need to retrain our brains to look at things differently. So think of this newsletter as a pair of rose-tinted glasses that will help you see things just a little bit more clearly. Some people may think that actively focusing on optimism in a moment of real crisis like the one we’re experiencing now will only lead to complacency — but I disagree. As Max Roser, the founder of the great progress data site Our World in Data, has said: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.” Realistic optimism isn’t just about feeling better. You have to believe the world is worth saving to build a movement that will improve it. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Clarity in this chaotic news cycle

We’re all drawn to bad news. Here’s how to fight it.