The news-organization incentive to emphasize the negative can be…
The news-organization incentive to emphasize the negative can be defended up to a point, since negative news usually is what the public most urgently needs to know. It's one thing, though, to highlight when the bad happens-as the media should-and another to pretend that the good does not happen, as the media also do.
— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Progresss Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Esaterbrook
In the book
On top of that ancient bias sits a modern machine: Western life is deliberately made to sound more perilous than it is by a media that magnifies every bad development and buries the good. We are primed to prefer bad news and to feel it as more urgent than it actually is. The party out of power exaggerates every negative trend and denies every positive one to harvest your anger, and a whole industry has grown skilled at discovering new categories of grievance. — Takeoff Into Chaos