I think there are a few additional factors that complicate the picture:
-front-page news is consumed way more than the rest, so the bad/good ratio in the top stories matters a lot. When I did an informal survey of two weeks of NYT front pages, bad was more prevalent than good by like 5:1.
-the badness of bad stories is much greater than the goodness of good stories. What's the opposite of "child brutally murdered"?
That could add up to a situation where, even if there's an equal amount of bad stories and good stories, the average news reader will come away feeling like things are very bad.
A good rule of thumb on good news vs bad news are from Gottman and Losadas: In general the amount of good news to bad news should be between 2:1 and 10:1, and optimally 5:1. If the positivity exceeds 91% then it is should raise eyebrows on being a Potemkin affair. Since the Lizardman ratio (minimal percentage of contrarians) is 4%, if the positivity rating is higher than 96% then the news can be considered homogeneous.
I think there are a few additional factors that complicate the picture:
-front-page news is consumed way more than the rest, so the bad/good ratio in the top stories matters a lot. When I did an informal survey of two weeks of NYT front pages, bad was more prevalent than good by like 5:1.
-even if people encounter a mix of good and bad, bad draws more attention (https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf). This is true in news consumption as well (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1908369116)
-the badness of bad stories is much greater than the goodness of good stories. What's the opposite of "child brutally murdered"?
That could add up to a situation where, even if there's an equal amount of bad stories and good stories, the average news reader will come away feeling like things are very bad.
A good rule of thumb on good news vs bad news are from Gottman and Losadas: In general the amount of good news to bad news should be between 2:1 and 10:1, and optimally 5:1. If the positivity exceeds 91% then it is should raise eyebrows on being a Potemkin affair. Since the Lizardman ratio (minimal percentage of contrarians) is 4%, if the positivity rating is higher than 96% then the news can be considered homogeneous.