And since they're always a kind of "emergency", an overriding situation for our brains to which we instinctively pay attention, that's the ultimate topic for news. Now with unlimited supply - if there's nothing bad happening in your city, local media will borrow something from elsewhere in the country. And if the whole nation had just a peaceful and happy week, they'll borrow something from abroad.
I do believe that as a society we need to reconsider the "freedom of press" in mainstream media. To be clear - the idea is based on the most honorable of principles. But with few decades of instant electronic communication behind us, we know few relevant things to be experimentally confirmed as facts:
- publishers have every reason to pick up most extreme examples for anything, and with lightspeed access to global information, they'll happily do this every day
- media plays havoc with our brains; in particular, with availability heuristic[0] - that makes us instinctively feel that everyone around us is rich hand happy (since our real neighbors, in terms of what we know about them, are media celebrities) and the world is a dangerous and brutal place (since we keep hearing about some crime or attack every single day - and the distance doesn't matter for availability heuristic)
- most people seem to be unaware that brains are not well adapted to our current technological environment, and in particular that if you don't constantly downplay or ignore most of the news, you're being lead to believe extremely wrong things - by the very virtue of availability heuristic
- those people vote
Something needs to be done about at least some of those points there. Trying to just educate people is too slow and too unreliable. I'm not saying "censor press" or something - but we need to somehow take into the account the standard failure mode media triggers in majority of population.
