At the beginning of this week an organisation called FutureCrunch ran an experiment...
On 7 August, a day that FutureCrunch say that they randomly picked in advance, they visited the top ten news sites in the world to see what stories were making headlines. According to Press Gazette, these websites, listed in order from number one to ten, are: BBC, MSN, CNN, NYtimes, DailyMail, news.google, Guardian, Foxnews, news.yahoo and finance.yahoo.
Combined, these websites receive over five billion visits a month, making them humanity's prime information-gathering apparatus - our most important tool for discovering what is happening beyond our immediate environment.
FutureCrunch decided not to include anything about climate change or the war in Ukraine, because those were considered genuinely newsworthy events. They also didn't include any sport, celebrity or politics news, which is basically all Trump anyway (apparently journalists have learned nothing after seven years). Once that was all removed, here's a mash-up illustration of what they found.
The news is supposed to tell us what's happening in the world. Right? It doesn't. Instead, thanks to a combination of commercial pressures, cognitive biases and cultural habits, news organisations have become modern-day doom machines, showcasing the absolute worst of humanity. There doesn't even appear to be a pretence at balance. The maxim "If it bleeds, it leads" seems to have a tight grip on the psyche of these news organisations and, as a result, its readers.
FutureCrunch concludes, and OGN Daily whole heartedly agrees, that the biggest problem with mainstream media today isn't fake news, or filter bubbles, or polarisation, or elitism, or the ongoing obsession with the website formerly known as Twitter.
The biggest problem is bad news.
Interestingly, when the Covid pandemic struck, most mainstream media noticed that their relentless reporting of doom and gloom was driving their readers away in droves. So, they started to inject some good news stories every now and then.
Sadly, once the pandemic was over - as the above analysis shows - they have all reverted to type.
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