IT’s not all negative
When I sat down to write this week's blog, I debated whether I should write about “stealthing” or the destruction of the coastal waters around Denmark. Two pretty damning issues hit the headlines on www.DR.dk – the main Danish public broadcaster, this week. It turns out that no law in Denmark protects women from unprotected sex. “Stealthing” is the word used to describe, when a man, without consent, secretly removes a condom during sex. In Germany, the UK, and other countries, this act is considered a punishable sexual crime – not in Denmark. The other story was about how despite a considerable number of environmental initiatives, laws, and guidelines, nitrate concentration in Danish waters has not been reduced, leaving our coastal waters in the worst shape ever. Both topics left me feeling that my country again is demonstrating that it is not delivering on promises made in September 2015, when we adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular, SDG 5 and SDG 14.
While both issues are worthy of deeper reflection – and I’ve promised myself to come back to both – I instead found myself researching “negativity bias” and constructive journalism. Human beings have evolved to react to threats, and humans have developed what is called a negativity bias. In my last blog, “0=44%”, I wrote a bit about similarity bias, which is our tendency to select people most like ourselves for jobs. We all have many different biases, which help us cope with the many decisions we are faced with every day. It's estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day. Deep consciousness about our biases can help us see the world around us and the people in it differently and often better.
In an interesting blog for ReputationX, Kent Cambell writes that negativity bias is the tendency to give far more attention to negative details than positive ones. As a result, bad news gets more attention, and more clicks, and leads to more revenue for publications. Google search results also react to this pattern by giving people what they seemingly want - that often means more bad news. The unfortunate fact is that negativity sells stories.
Under the ‘negative’ headline, “more Danes choose to avoid the news”, www.DR.dk also reported this week that 20 percent of Danes actively avoid reading the news because they feel sad about the many negative news stories from home and abroad. DR’s own media research entity has chosen to focus on this in its annual report on the development of Danes' digital media habits, which was published this past week. News fatigue is particularly widespread among young people, as almost every third of young Danes avoid the news for periods of time, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism earlier this month.
Dennis Christensen, head of DR Media Research, suggests that to get users back, the media can, for example, try to work differently and more constructively with the news. “Sometimes it's all very depressing. It is possible to look at solutions and perspectives and focus on some of the things that actually work”, he says.
The fact is, every day ordinary people do extraordinary things, and extraordinary people are doing marvelous things. This is the true state of the world, but that state isn’t reflected in the news. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the negativity bias, and the distorting effect it can have on our perception of the trouble in the world, and take the information gained from the news with a pinch of salt. The negativity bias is not the only cognitive error that could affect the feeling that the world is filled with predominantly negative news. Confirmation bias may also play a role. This bias refers to people interpreting new information so that their prior conclusions remain faultless, which could lead to people discrediting information that points to the world not being as troubled as they perceive. Instead, by continuing to attend to negative news, they would confirm their hypothesis. This illustrates that the negativity bias is not the only factor coming into play when considering why people perceive the world as worsening, but it does show a large part of the picture.
Fortunately, there are some great alternative news sources out there, that can help us overcome our negativity and confirmation biases. While researching this blog, I came across a magazine – Positive News – that I hadn’t seen before. They call themselves, the magazine for good journalism about good things. When much of the media is full of doom and gloom, instead Positive News was the first media organization in the world that is dedicated to quality, independent reporting about what’s going right. They say they are pioneers of ‘constructive journalism’ – a new approach in the media, which is about rigorous and relevant journalism that is focused on progress, possibility, and solutions. Check out their “What went right in 2022: the top 25 good news stories of the year” – if you want a real lift on the state of the world.
The Danish equivalent, “The World's Best News,” started as an information campaign in 2010. Global Focus (the then NGO FORUM), the Danish government's overseas aid agency (Danida), and the UN were behind the initiative. Surveys showed that the Danish population knew very little about the developing countries - and that people generally believed that the world was doing much worse than it actually was in a wide range of areas, for example, poverty and disease control, war, and conflict. The campaign aimed to inform Danes about global progress, the UN's 2015 Goals, and Danish development cooperation simply and constructively. Since then, “The World’s Best News” has developed into an independent media, and they were founded as an independent association in 2016. Check out their English language version here. Here, they give a dose of positivity about how people, governments, and other non-state partners across the world are rallying behind the Sustainable Development Goals. No country can claim to have achieved them, but we can all learn from each other and strive to improve.
2023 marks the halfway point from 2015 to 2030 and the target year for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. The fact is, that we are unlikely to reach the goals set. The negative aggregate must however never steal the headlines from the millions of individuals, groups, companies, and governments who are dedicated to using Global Goals to drive change for people, the planet, and prosperity.