Bad News Sells Better Than Good News

[David Blanchard]

Here’s the headline from a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers’ press release:

“U.S. Industrial Manufacturers Expect Lower Growth Rates for the Next 12 Months.” Hmmm, that doesn’t sound so good, does it? But when you drill down into the actual text of the press release (which is publicizing a new study), what’s really going on, and what could just as easily have been trumpeted in the headline, is this:

“U.S. Industrial Manufacturers Expect Growth Rate of 5.7% for the Next 12 Months.”

It’s curious that PWC chose to accentuate the negative in the headline rather than the positive. True, there is a downside to the story -- growth projections are down a few percentage points from a previous report -- but why lead with the bad news, which really isn’t “news” at all? Of course, the answer is obvious: Bad news is more likely to attract a casual reader’s eye than good news. It’s a secret journalists have known for years (and in fact, we even succumbed ourselves to the negative slant when we posted the story here): bad news gets more attention than good news, meaning more people are likely to read a story if the headline implies something rotten rather than something wonderful. Doesn't mean people want for bad things to happen, of course -- just that they're more inclined to want to read about them.

In this particular instance, PWC surveyed 61 industrial manufacturing executives, as they do every quarter, and these execs opine on how optimistic they’re feeling. What ends up happening, then, is that news outlets pick up on the story and run with it as breaking news on the economy, when of course that’s not what’s actually going on. It’s a survey, based on the opinion of a very small group of people.

In any event, as you read further into the press release, you’ll see that the expected growth rate of 5.7% is down from the much more optimistic 8.1% expected in the previous quarter. You would at the very least then assume that the press release from three months ago would’ve been very upbeat and positive, right? Well, no. Here’s the headline from April 25, 2007:

“Continued slowing of U.S. economy leads to decrease in domestic optimism.”

Huh? You can read through the entire press release and not even see a single mention of that 8.1% growth rate “statistic.” Instead, PWC used an entirely different yardstick—the number of people who were optimistic, rather than the expected rate of growth—to come up with a “decrease.” And even that is somewhat negated by the actual findings, where we discover that “only 5% of manufacturers were reported as being pessimistic about the current U.S. economy.”

This sounds like I’m singling out PWC, but that’s not the case. It’s part of a trend that’s as old as speech itself—bad news is inherently “juicier” than good news, and the press (and I’m not giving IndustryWeek a pass here, either) is as much to blame as anybody. People Magazine, for instance, isn’t going to sell very many copies with a headline like this:

“Lindsay Lohan Enjoys Quiet Evening Reading Robert Frost Poems.”

While everybody wants to hear only good news when it comes to their own financial and personal health, apparently the thought that other people are suffering makes for good reading. Go figure.

So is there any chance in the world that this “bad news trumps good news” trend will change any time soon? Probably not. Here’s a headline from today’s USAToday:

“Manufacturing expands but at slowest pace since March.”

And so it goes…

[bradintx]

David

Do you think that the negative reporting (specifically realted to the economy) could have any bias based on which political party is in power? Have you searched back to the headlines during the last administration so see if there is any correlation?

[David Blanchard]

Originally Posted by bradintx

Do you think that the negative reporting (specifically realted to the economy) could have any bias based on which political party is in power? Have you searched back to the headlines during the last administration so see if there is any correlation?

I suspect that there's some truth in what you're saying. As I noted above, and usually try to mention any time I'm citing survey findings, the reason journalists (like me) love surveys so much is that they come with an obvious bias, which gives the journalist to opportunity to agree, disagree or occasionally make fun of the survey findings:

Sometimes the bias is purely commercial: A survey sponsored by Company X (a vendor of software to design stained glass windows) discovers that 80% of all stained glass window manufacturers are now using software to design their windows (I'm just making this up, of course). These give a journalist the opportunity to say, "Oh, duh! Of COURSE they're going to conclude the software is key to their operations. If the survey had said otherwise, they wouldn't even be mentioning it."

Sometimes the bias is purely political: "The U.S. economy added 50,000 new jobs last month, which is a clear sign that the Bush Administration is clueless because the economy should've added twice that many." Or maybe it reads like this: "A robust U.S. economy added another 50,000 jobs last month, the 17th month in a row that the jobs base has expanded--a clear sign that the Bush economic plan is working." Most journalists tend to shy away from overtly tipping their hand as to which political camp they prefer, which is why on any given day you might read economic news on the IW web site that seems contradictory. Sometimes we just report and let you decide; sometimes we analyze and let you agree or disagree.

And then there are the surveys, like this one from PWC or any of the oodles of surveys conducted by the analyst groups, that basically exist to make a name for the analyst groups and establish them as an authority in that market.

In all likelihood, most of these surveys end up circulating through publications and websites because the conclusions drawn are interesting and might lead to a discussion of the underlying premise behind the survey. Conducting these surveys and then analyzing the results takes quite a bit of time and legwork (which I know from experience from having conducted salary surveys for various industries over the past 20 years, including the IW 2007 Salary Survey), so I appreciate the effort that goes into them, even though the actual "news value" of a survey might be far less than the "discussion value."