Negative News
Negating Negative news
By Madhu.S
“The question of negative news arises out of negation of moral
principles”
Negative news have two
dimensions, one in which is portrays a matter in a negative manner (context
specific) and other which gives a negative view of a matter (content specific).
For example, the death of a person can be given a negative outlook by
incorporating ‘suspicious circumstances of the cause of death’ equal to that of
a murder. This is the context specific negativity. Content specific negativity arises
in case where news is shown to believe on the bad reputation of a country or a
person. This type of negative news is used usually to cause discomfort or throw
bad light on a person or a country, something which the western media usually
does while portraying Afghanistan or like countries.
Interestingly the scope of
negative news is immense, as there exists a class of people who take interest
of such news and another set who uses it as an opportunity. The concept of
yellow journalism is the child of the second class of people supported by the
first class of people. Ex Chief Minister IK Gujaral, Former head of ISRO Mr
Nambi Narayan etc are known victims of this.
Effect of negative news
reporting:
News portrayed in the negative light has a lot
to do with the psychic of the creator and the end-user or journalist/editor and
reader/people. Journalism exists on creating or inventing news rather than
innovating news. Competition among different media and between peers has
ordained the existence of such news. However, a large section of the
journalists believe that a huge market exists for such negative news. Creating
interesting news has direct relation to the customer satisfaction. Politicians
are the major class of people who support negativity.
Jan Kleinnijenhuis (2002) in his
seminal article Negative News and the Sleeper Effect of Distrust gives
interesting reading on how negative news are been used to instigate and
dissuade opponents, critical during the election periods. According to him,
negative news creates distrusts between political peers which acts as sleeper
effect on the people or persuades them to distrust the politicians. In fact
various research done by Neuroscientists represent that the outcomes of
elections depend largely on rapid, unreflective trait inferences of competence
and reliability that occur within a one-second exposure to the faces of the
candidates (Todorov et al. 2005).
When the face of the candidates
is flashed through different media associated with corruption or criminal offences,
the voters tend to distrust such people. Interestingly, all major political
parties take the same route in this game of “winning by tarnishing”. Herein lie’s
other factors as to which negative factors outweigh the other. If we measure
the negativity of news and come with an index, we can see that political issues
dominate the rankings. News related to sports or weather can be found to have
the lowest score because of the neutrality involved into it. While sport teams
and weather incidents can also be prone to negativity.
The causal effect of readership
or viewership is directly linked to negative news. Richard Posner, a
Correspondent of New York Times had termed the act of creating sensationalism
as bad news. It was found that the arise of negative news owes to the decline
of mainstream news and the arrival of visual media leading to a deterioration
in quality.
In a recent poll conducted by the
Hindu, it was found that Indians still believed that newspaper have wider
quality and credibility spending around 37 minutes for reading it (2006:Indian
Readership Survey). While visual media and mobile news reporting is considered
to be least credible. The 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer which studied on
credibility of advertisements in different media found that advertising and
social networks as news media are not considered as being credible sources of
information in India by opinion leaders.
Though no formal studies have been conducted on negative news, opinion
leaders believe that with the advent of new media, quality and credibility has
deteriorated with an increase in negative news.
Effect on readers:
The Center for Media and Public
Affairs did a study on network coverage of murder. Between 1990 and 1995, the
murder rate in the U.S. went down thirteen percent. But during that same
period, network coverage of murders increased three hundred percent. If you
happened to watch a lot of news during that period, you would probably have
gotten the impression that murders in America were escalating out of control,
when in fact the situation was improving.[1] Cynicism
and pessimism is considered to be one of the potent factors that drive negative
news. Health experts believe that frequent exposure to negative news creates
higher chance of heart failures and slow reaction against medicines.
It is believed that inducing fear, frequent reproaching
and disparagement by various media is causing a strong sense of pique among the
readers. With the resultant splurge in ‘cry-till-night’ operas and cynical
comedy shows proves the fact that negativity is increasing in a routine manner
causing grave issues family issues caused through distrust. Factually incorrect
News headlines with minimum veracity involved like “Boss runs with wedded
employee”, “Raped husband kills wife” etc has been increasing clogging as Page
3 columns and newspapers.
Be-positive:
While there is no medicine to
cure such illness, but there are better options for preventing it from being
acute. The core of the issue of negative news lies in the demand and the supply
chain. Self-regulation is a weak word to be issued to restrict the use of
negative news, but can be a more effective weapon. The Norms of Journalistic
conduct framed by the Press Council of India, 2006 provides a good framework
for regulating the use of negative use with the sole purpose of increasing
readership by doing more harm to the victimized. The Preamble to the guidelines
is clear to avoid any discrepancies of negativity which states “The fundamental
objective of journalism is to serve the people with news, views, comments and
information on matters of public interest in a fair, accurate, unbiased, sober
and decent manner.” Only if the print and visual media unequivocally stand to
protect themselves to be the tools for negative news, shall it be effective.
Reviewing and editing of
negative news is left to the public especially when it is a free and open
field. Educating the readers shall be a mandate of all media, so that the
readers themselves can shrug off negative impacts of news. The public shall be
given opportunities to rate and rank articles, news and views moderated by a
Readers Editor (eg: The Hindu). This will act as a check and balance in
negating any attempts to promote sensationalism. The readers and the viewers
have the right to be provided accurate and quality news, while the media should
act as the agents of change through an impartial and unbiased and open
platform. Maintaining quality standards should be the norm and the compliance
with it the rule for all media alike. The fact is that only 55-60 percent of
the people in India are literate and only 242 million people read newspapers in
India (IRS), with a large growth opportunity for the media. There around 80
television news channels catering to the news requirements of the Indian
audience spanning from agricultural price to budget for agriculture to latest
films of bollywood stars to the number of runs scored by Sachin Tendulkar. It
is a necessity that all media as a responsible media provide authentic and
accurate news to the Indians to progress and develop.
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