Why does the news feel so relentlessly negative?
Some of it is the world, and some of it is how the news reaches you. Serious problems deserve coverage. But negative words have been shown to nudge clicks, feeds seldom give you a place to stop, and one event can reach you ten times without telling you anything new. Together, those things can make the news feel heavier than the facts alone.
A warning is news. An endless warning is something else.
Start with the part that isn’t a distortion. Floods, wars, court rulings and failing public services are hard to read about because they are hard to live through. Reporting that digs into harm is doing its job. A sunnier version of the same story would not be a more accurate one.
The trouble starts with repetition. Take an imaginary flood. The first report says what happened. The second says who is affected. Weeks later, an investigation explains why the defences failed. Each one tells you something new. Now picture ten alerts about the same flooded streets, with a round of reactions between each. The volume goes up, but your understanding stays where it was.
So it helps to keep two questions apart: how important is this event, and how much does this particular update add? The answer to the first can be ‘very’ while the answer to the second is ‘not much’.
The headline has a job: get your attention
Headlines compete for a tap, and negative words seem to help a little. Researchers analysed thousands of headline experiments run by the US publisher Upworthy between 2013 and 2015, in which different headlines for the same story were shown to randomly selected readers. Their 2023 paper in Nature Human Behaviour found that, for a headline of average length, the researchers estimated a 2.3% higher click-through rate for each additional negative word, and about 1% lower for each positive word.
That 2.3% is a relative change. A headline that would have earned 100 clicks might earn about 102. That is not 2.3 extra clicks for every 100 people who saw it. The limits matter as much as the number: this was one publisher, which the authors themselves describe as different from traditional news, and the data are more than a decade old. The study measured clicks on headlines. It did not measure how readers felt, whether the articles were accurate or what the editors intended.
Our view is that a click is a weak measure of whether something was worth your time. A headline can win your attention and still leave you no clearer about what happens next.
More routes into news, fewer natural stopping points
Where you meet the news matters too. In the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, an average of 54% of respondents across 48 markets said they used social media and video networks for news, compared with 51% for news organisations’ own websites and apps. Many people use both, so these are overlapping groups rather than slices of one audience. The survey is conducted online with about 2,000 people per market, and the report notes that this slightly over-represents online habits.
A feed can put valuable reporting in front of someone who would otherwise miss it. It can also mix a new fact, an old clip and an angry reaction into one unbroken scroll. They may look alike on a screen, but that doesn’t make them equally reliable or equally new.
A printed paper has a back page. A feed can always find you one more reaction. Not everyone finds that tiring, but it does leave the decision about when to stop entirely with you.
Stepping away can have many reasons
Plenty of people step back. In the report’s UK data, 50% of respondents said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up four percentage points on the previous year. Across all 48 markets, the average was 42%, unchanged from the year before.
These are self-reported answers from an online sample. They are not a diagnosis, and the headline figure doesn’t say why any one person pulls away. Someone might find a story upsetting, be tired of repetition, distrust how it is presented, or simply have other priorities. Avoiding one subject doesn’t mean a person doesn’t care, and a single percentage can’t show that everyone is overwhelmed.
Ask what a useful update would add
Here is the test we’d suggest: what am I trying to understand, and what would count as a real update? If a storm is heading for your area, frequent official alerts are exactly what you need. For a long-running policy argument, one considered report at the end of the day may tell you more than a dozen reactions.
A useful update changes your understanding. It might bring a new fact, a consequence, an honest account of what is still uncertain or a credible challenge to an earlier claim. Leave room for reporting outside your usual interests as well, because a narrow selection can miss the story you didn’t know to look for. Our article on the blind spots of personalised news looks at that trade-off.
This is the problem we are working on at Carrot, a news app that is still in development. We want a brief to show clearly whether an item is a new development or another reaction to the same one. Whether Carrot does that well is something we will need to demonstrate, not something we can claim yet. There is no perfect quota for news. The aim is to follow events that matter without treating every interruption as progress. If coverage is affecting your wellbeing, Mind’s guide to coping with upsetting news has practical suggestions.