Just Imagine If Everyone Thought About Solutions Rather Than Problems

This seems like an unlikely thing to be said in a meeting with any News Editor – that he tells you to go out there and dig up some feel-good stories. Bad News sells, right? That is the old adage that gets trotted out, but how true is it? Do people really want to just sit around and read about other people’s misfortune? That seems like a really sad state of affairs.

Bad news – it distorts the picture of what is happening in the world. Think of the interactions you have in the week and put them into two columns – do you think they are likely to come out in the ratios that the News would have us believe exists? That everything is bad and the whole world is going down the tubes?

Over two thirds of stories on a news segment seem to be bad, with your cherry on top human interest story at the end. If life were really like this would so many people actually make it through the day?

Type in good news to most search engines and you don’t get what you might expect, at least not at the moment. The word “news” has been more than a little tarnished in conversations lately, so it is perhaps understandable that the same is true of the term good news. Good news is fungible with real news it seems. Bad news is likewise synonymous with fake news.

Bad News Is A Distortion Of The Real Picture

This site seemed to be mostly good news, but even here a little bit of bad news had seeped in. It’s a hard thing to control it seems, if you automate any aspect of your site.

I’m not advocating looking at the world in a way that obfuscates real problems, but is there really a problem that doesn’t have some kind of solution? I mean obviously, if you are talking about some incurable disease then there may not be an actual definitive solution, but you can include something about any advances in the field. Solution free reporting means you are just giving your readers a problem, and with their own problems forming a bedrock in their life, the last thing they want are more unsolvable situations. It makes people turn off from the news, and that means they become ill-informed, and when people think about what is going on in the news they can only talk about it in terms of intractable problems.

Wouldn’t it be so much better if people talked in terms of possible solutions? Solutions offer hope, and hopeful people are much more enjoyable to talk to. You would be looking at the problems through the right of the telescope and seeing them as thing that could be overcome, and this would make them more likely to get solved.