ROTHENBURGER — We can’t help it if we prefer bad news

COLUMN — When people rant against the media for publishing too much bad news, I often use the airplane comparison.

Do you ever wake up in the morning and turn on the radio or TV, or fire up the iPad to find out if a plane landed safely somewhere? Are you anxious to know about all the people who arrived at the airport on their way to business meetings or vacations without incident?

Ninety thousand airplanes take off and land safely every day. About once every four days, one has an accident. Every six weeks or so, there’s a major crash, like the Germanwings tragedy.

The chances of being involved in a fatal air crash are one in 45 million.

We assume most airplanes are going to arrive at their destinations without anything going wrong. It’s only when something does go wrong that we pay attention, because it’s unusual, and news is about the unusual. And, more often than not, the unusual involves negative news.

It’s not news when people sit around a campfire singing Kumbaya. We don’t pick up our phones and call the newsroom and say, “Get a reporter out here, there are a bunch of people getting along.”

But when people march off to war, or a mob rampages through the streets smashing windows and looting stores, that’s news.

One study I saw concluded that for every good news story, there are 17 bad-news stories, and that sounds about right. We’re more attracted to bad news than we are to good news.

Studies have shown that headlines with negative words are read more than headlines with positive words. In fact, headlines with positive words are read less than neutral headlines.

In other words, if I write a headline that says “People gather for event,” you’ll be more likely to read it than if I write one that says, ”People celebrate wonderful event.” Doesn’t make much sense, does it? But it’s no surprise that if I write a headline that says, “Unruly mob takes over street,” it will grab your attention more than the other two.

Words like never, bad, worst, fear, tragic, death, disease and horror are headline attention grabbers.

But why? Is it the chicken, or the egg? Have we become conditioned to bad news by the media, or have we conditioned the media to feed us bad news? Other than curiosity, is there some deeper reason behind our news preferences?

A McGill University study may have come up with the answer. Researchers Mark Trussier and Stuart Soroka confirmed, not surprisingly, people’s preference for bad news. But they also found that people who were more interested in current affairs and politics were most likely to be drawn to bad news even if they claimed they weren’t.

Trussier and Soroko surmised that our hunger for bad news is part of our survival instinct. Our senses are naturally more alert to negative situations because we’re conditioned to avoid danger. Those taking part in the experiment actually hit a button faster when negative words were flashed in front of them than when positive words came up.

They further concluded that we react more intensely and readily to bad news because we’re generally satisfied with the way things are. When something goes wrong, our brains are jolted into that defensive mode. Which brings us back to the old premise that good news is usually routine while bad news is out of the ordinary.

Not that we totally discard good news. I’ve told people since my early days in journalism that the media publish plenty of good news, and they do — everybody likes a photo of a cuddly puppy. It’s just that they pay more attention to a picture of a dog who needs help, or one that has attacked somebody.

So, media are messengers for bad news, but they’re not to blame. We, the consumers, want what they’re giving us, because we just can’t help ourselves. It’s in our genes.

Mel Rothenburger can be contacted at armchairmayor@gmail.com. He tweets @MelRothenburger and is on Facebook/mrothenburger.7.