As I write these lines, a photograph of a married couple who overdosed in their car while their child sat in the back seat has reached local portals. This horrific sight of people on the brink of death was originally published on their pages by the American police with the aim of raising awareness about the dangers of narcotics. The move has sparked a series of discussions in America about whether police officers can violate privacy rights even when it comes to fighting for the common good, but none about whether and how the media should report this news. Looking at how local media conveyed it (without any message, warning, explanation, or point), one can conclude nothing other than that they exploited the tragedy of a child to increase click counts. Unfortunately, this case is not exceptional in any way. It is a painful realization that the media, in their hunt for an audience, publish and process stories that provoke panic, discomfort, and fear in the same way, even when there is no objective reason for it. This trend of so-called ‘fear-based’ media is aptly described by the saying ‘If it bleeds, it leads’, which loosely translates to the idea that modern media owners have realized that in a market flooded with information, headlines that in any way involve violence, danger, or even sensationalism perform best, regardless of how much they actually harm their audience. The latter is not an empty threat. Besides the fact that it is absurd that the media have allowed their credibility to fall so low that the audience consumes them with a grain of salt (probably lying), most have completely distanced themselves from their fundamental function, so instead of serving the people, they harm them and pollute the mind.
Innate Instincts That this is the case is confirmed by the reputable Psychology Week, which calls for a discussion on this problem, as the media seriously worsen the mental health of their audience and contribute to the rise in the number of people suffering from anxiety to chronic depression. As Rašeljka Maras, a communicator and expert in personal transformation, states, watching the news and reading texts, even headlines, triggers a certain kind of stress, whether driven by positive or negative emotions. – When the human body is continuously under excitement and stress, it releases significantly higher amounts of adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that make us acutely happy but undermine our immunity in the long run. It may be difficult to find a connection between stress, illness, and the media, but it is visible at every turn – explains Maras, who adds that good news is essential for the health of the body, even when times are tough. In this sense, the media participate in building a negative stance and often diminish the value of some content with a sensationalist approach, leaving people space to have a sort of ‘vent’ where they can pour their thoughts into comments. – Commenting should be banned, as it is often extremely aggressive, uncivilized, and borderline psychotic, and brings nothing good to either the reader or the one who invests their energy in writing such comments. There will always be scandalous and grandiose things, and that is fine, but we as readers and the media as content creators should strive for balance for mutual benefit – explains Maras. However, to find balance, it is necessary to understand why it is so difficult to resist panic-driven and sensationalist headlines and what motivates the media to resort to such perfidious weapons. Negative and shocking headlines are so enticing for a very simple reason – we are human. Our minds are ‘tuned’ to react to danger. Fear is an innate instinct that keeps our heads on our shoulders, and therefore the mind will absorb every, even the smallest hint of a threat, and then process it from all angles. The greater the danger and the more familiar the threat, the more engaged the mind will be, and the body will be under greater stress. Or, as American security expert Gavin de Becker explained on his page, the mind will not be as concerned with the idea of whether the Earth could slip out of its orbit and collide with Jupiter, but it will be caught in a panic if there is even a chance that someone could produce a nuclear bomb on their own because that is a ‘more familiar’ topic, about which information can be found in the media or various social networks.
Follow the Statistics The user does not think about the chances of that actually happening, but the very probability creates panic. Or, in Becker’s words, we often fear completely the wrong things that have nothing to do with reality. For example, statistics show that you are much more likely to be killed by lightning than to die in a terrorist attack (this data does not apply to war zones, of course). But the brain finds it a bit harder to perceive this (or deals with it less often), especially if the number of casualties in some bombing attack has been published in every damned media outlet. The media, according to click counts, quickly realized how they must tone the news to attract the audience’s attention, and thus advertisers. The trick is to identify some danger and inform the audience that there is a solution or additional explanation in their content, even for a banal danger (for example, texts with headlines like ‘You Won’t Believe What Marinko Found in a Glass of Water!’). The practice of ‘fear-based’ media (and that is the majority), as Psychology Today writes, is to present dramatic anecdotes of individuals as scientific facts, isolated events as trends, and replace optimistic thinking with fatalistic. In the end, you do not get a better-informed consumer, a consumer who has avoided immediate danger (because there was none), but a person who must continue to live with completely irrational fear in their bones. The media today are to blame for the audience, despite statistical indicators and scientific research, thinking they live in a world more violent than it has ever been, in fear that they will be judged by a deadly virus that developed in a glass of green tea or a neighbor who is a potential psychopath just because he is withdrawn and greets on the street. This plague of fear-based reporting has spread to some very serious media that, due to new technologies, do not deliver stories in the same way as before. To stay current and relevant, ‘serious’ media have less time to deliver a story, investigate it from all relevant angles, and serve it to the audience in the most objective and truthful way.
