Good News!

Have you noticed that in newspapers, on television, and online, more bad news is reported than good news? Me too, because it is.

I wondered if it had always been that way, so I did a little research. The bad news is that the news is leaning much more to bad these days. In fact it seems to have shifted more negative starting around 2000 or so. If your generation is earlier than Gen Z, you might remember that around 2000 is when web browsers were beginning to replace newspapers. Within a very short period of time, the world could be reached from the top of a desk in the corner of a basement in a nondescript neighborhood in a tiny town, and the “reporter” could remain anonymous.

The Internet (back then it was always capitalized) was soon flooded with the opinions of hundreds of thousands — actually millions — of bloggers.

My very good friend Bill was one of those. He was the first, and may still be the only, professional blogger in my circle. But for him it wasn’t a chance to be heard as much as it was an opportunity to earn a living. He started on his own but soon joined a then thriving but now defunct company called Know More Media. (The double entendre was completely intentional.) They paid him to produce content, and produce he did.

Perhaps one day Bill will write a history of his experience, and in it he will say, “Lewis was a skeptic.” He will be correct, but I was far more skeptical of the whole “blogger” world than I was of him.

Chasing pages

It was through Bill that I learned about page views and clicks and Google ads and links and ping-backs (if that’s the term), and other ways to get that revenue flowing. He was very good at it all because he was measuring everything and increasing what worked best.

One evening he and his wife walked into our couples small group and announced that his blogs had reached 1,000,000 page views! We were all amazed. We didn’t know what it meant, but we were genuinely happy for him.

Partly because he had reached his primary goal, and partly because the rules of engagement on blogging were changing rapidly, he eventually moved on to other internet activities. He started holding meetups when meetups were fairly new, he became a guru (my term, not his) on content marketing, and he booked himself as a speaker on cruise ships. But that’s another story.

When I started Do Good U, Bill was right there encouraging me and suggesting various approaches and ideas. He’d long been a fan of my writing, so naturally he suggested a blog. I asked him about content, and he said something like this: If you want to get a lot of readers, you need to create controversy.

Blatantly biased opinions and bad news may well be siblings. If they are not, they are at least first-cousins. If there is anything people like better than bad news, it is hearing their own position defended with erudite arguments while the opposing position is cleverly dismissed with a laugh.

Each weekday I receive an email column from the New York Times called “The Morning.” It’s about the news of the day, with a little opinion tossed in. I subscribed to it on purpose and I keep the subscription on purpose, all so I can see how those with a world view different than my own present their opinion on things. It often makes me smile, which I’m pretty sure is not their goal.

Imagine This

Whether it is a biased opinion or bad news, every newspaper and every blog can get and maintain more readers by giving the audience emotionally charged content — especially if the emotional charge is negative. Why? Humans, psychologists tell us, have something called negativity bias, and they say it is “built in” to the brain. Perhaps they say that because they have negativity bias and don’t want it to be their fault.

I think we train ourselves — partly as a defense mechanism and partly because we hear so much that is negative — to see things with a negative slant. I can think of three famous fictional characters who are world class at being sad, depressed, and just generally gloomy: Pictured above, they are Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Joe Btfsplk from Li’l Abner. They all have their reasons for being dejected, and so do we. Life is not fair, after all.

So I had this very odd thought: What if the shepherds in the field near Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago were Eeyore, Marvin, and Joe?

I’m referring to the account from Luke (in the Bible) of the heavenly announcement of the birth of Jesus. That is the real event we just celebrated, and the first “outside” people who heard about that miracle were shepherds. Here it is from the New Living Translation:

That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem….”

When the angels had returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem! Let’s see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

And go they did, and after they saw the child they told everyone they could find — “Good news!! The Messiah is here!”

Not even Eeyore, Marvin, and Joe Btfsplk combined could have mustered enough negative bias to refute the message of the angel. Negative bias lost that night, and it still does.

Rejoice, even after you’ve opened your presents, because the best Good News ever is still true and still good: Jesus has been born.

Do good. It’s in you!!