I read an interesting article the other day about why the media seem to prefer bad news.
The psychologists gathered a group of people, and told them they were testing a new camera that tracked their eye movements. They gave them a specially prepared "news website" to read, which had good and bad news in various places on the pages. They were told it was simply something to read, to test the camera, so it didn't matter where they looked or how long it took.
There was indeed an eye tracking camera.
The end result, as you will have guessed, is that generally speaking there was a preference for looking at the bad news.
Here it is:
www.bbc.com/future/article/20140728-why-is-all-the-news-bad
As an antidote, new to Alexa is "Alexa, tell me some good news", and will pull out some bit of doodah from the papers and read it to you.
I tried it once, and got some ghastly story which Alexa told me was from The Metro, whatever that is, about two women who grew up together, suffered various travails together and had their first children at the same time and...well, that was it.
And indeed, my reaction was really? How very tedious and uninteresting.
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