When a country’s economy becomes so dominated by a single export industry that it drives up the value of that country’s currency and makes other exports un-competitive, it is said to have ‘the Dutch Disease.’ The eventual outcome is total economic failure [1]. Douglas Adams explored the phenomena to absurd lengths in his book, ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.’ He described the fate of the planet Brontitall, which fell victim to the Shoe Event Horizon, Adam’s own fictional model of economic downfall [2].

Brontital starts out as a thriving, happy planet except with a slight excess of shoe shops. The book postulates that whenever people get depressed they tend to look down, and when they look down, they see their shoes. To cheer themselves up, they might buy themselves a new pair. Thus, the demand for shoes rises to a point where it outstrips the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases as shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often when manufacturers resort to cheap mass production, which causes shoe quality to drop further.

What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, the economy destabilises to a point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.

Surely such a farcical situation couldn’t happen in real life. If you pay any attention to the current state of our news you might be excused for thinking that it is not only possible but actually happening. Why are newspapers and TV broadcasts filled with disaster, corruption and incompetence? Could it be that, as a species, we’re unwittingly drawn to depressing stories?

It might go some way to explaining why news services seem to compete with each other to bring us the absolute worst of the news. Are journalists drawn to reporting bad news because sudden disaster is more compelling than incremental improvements? It could also be that news gatherers find that reports of corrupt politicians or natural disasters make for simpler stories (the cynical might posture that they are also easier to investigate and write about). Could we be living through a Bad News Event Horizon? Like the shoes on Brontital, is our news becoming cheap, mass-produced fabrication? Fake news seems to be a topic on everyone’s lips and social networks appear to have a voracious appetite for stories of dubious veracity. Rigorous research of the facts no longer seem to be important to journalists and detailed reporting of cause and effect seem to be of no importance to an audience hungry for doom and gloom.

Why does the media concentrate on the bad things? And what might this depressing slant say about us, the audience? Have we, the readers and viewers, inadvertently trained journalists to focus on negativity? It seems unlikely, ask anyone and they will tell you that they prefer good news: but is that actually true?

Surveys confirm that the current corona pandemic has captured the world’s attention. Only terrorist attacks and a few blockbuster political events (the US presidential election and Theresa May’s Brexit deal defeat) have come close to achieving similar ratings – and the coronavirus has remained at the top of our news agenda for some time. In the UK, statistics show that the story reached more than half of the population throughout February, that is apart from one week when the tragic death of Caroline Flack and the floods in England and Wales diverted our collective attention. The distraction didn’t last long. The closer the virus got to the UK, the more attention it received, hitting new all-time highs of audience saturation in March as the UK health minister, Nadine Dorries, and hundreds of other Britons tested positive, the markets suffered their worst day since the financial crisis and Italy went into lockdown. It’s not only the UK, polling by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed that the pandemic received more media attention among Americans than any event going back to 2009.

We need an objective assessment of our own engagement to better understand whether we are doing this to ourselves. Sadly, research into how people relate to the news has been somewhat subjective and disjointed in that previous studies have allowed participants to browse news stories at home, for example, where you don’t really know who is engaging with the news through a shared computer, or where the ambitions of a study were somewhat unrealistic, inviting volunteers to select stories in the lab and where participants knew their choices were being watched closely. Researchers from McGill University in Canada recently adopted an alternate approach [3]. Subterfuge! They invited volunteers to take part in a study looking at eye tracking. Those taking part were first asked to pick some political stories to read so that the camera could make a baseline eye-tracking assessment.

They were told, that it was important to actually read the articles so that a good baseline could be established but that it didn't matter what they read. After the baseline assessments each subject was asked to watch a short video (the alleged main purpose of the experiment), after which they were asked questions on the kind of political news they prefer to read.

Like the stories that most participants interacted with, the study findings were somewhat depressing. People often chose stories with a negative tone – corruption, set-backs, natural disasters, hypocrisy – rather than neutral or positive stories. Those who had noted an interest in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose ‘bad news’ options. Even more depressing, these participants said they preferred to hear about good news. And yet, the general consensus of the participants was that the media was too focussed on negative stories.

We wouldn’t expect such a subjective, opinion-driven focus on negative news amid the scientific community, would we? Our own experiences suggest that you might be disappointed to hear otherwise. We should expect news in the field of science and medicine to be positive in nature (particularly since journals are biased in terms of publishing positive findings)[4]. Although we focus on the null hypothesis, the very act of reporting on science is based on progress – a term that in itself sounds positive. At Niche we are keen on promoting the successes of our fellow scientists and as such we post daily about stories of new advances on our Linked in page and on our news hub – FYI-News (www.fyinews.co.uk). Every morning we trawl news reporting services looking for exciting new developments. We make every effort to select and promote only reports from the scientific literature that detail real scientific progress.

It is generally accepted that the process of scientific reporting is somewhat protracted – where submission, editorial consideration, referee review, content modification and eventual publication often takes months. You might therefore expect the current corona virus situation to have not yet appeared in significant volumes in the scientific literature. Journals generally have a backlog of scientific findings waiting to be published? Not so it seems. It is now almost impossible to find news not related to the virus. Journal editors preach that the hoops authors are expected to jump through on the road to publication represent tried and tested methods to ensure that the work a journal publishes is of the highest quality and relevant to the focus of the journal. We might expect, therefore, that scientific journals are not like newspapers and will not have thrown themselves on the media bandwagon.

A few minutes on the websites Elsevier, Wiley and Springer, publishers who are currently responsible for over half of the scientific papers, show that science has sadly run away to the circus. Not only has the recent pandemic seen news services of all types swamped with COVID-related tittle-tattle, so has the literature. Clearly, there are important new findings to report around the virus but what happens when the only subject it is possible to report IS the virus – do we hit a COVID event horizon? Should previously respected journals like Nature, Lancet and Cell be chasing after covid-research in an attempt to be relevant? What happens to the objective selection process for the highest quality research? The journals say they have responded to the surge in coronavirus-related submissions by accelerating the peer review process to ensure rapid dissemination, though it isn’t clear exactly what the process change has involved. What happens to the other non-covid science that we must assume was eagerly anticipating publication? I am not the only person to have noticed.

New Scientist also noted an ‘infodemic’ of poor information, though the journal firmly places the blame at the door of preprint servers [5]. In contrast, Nature comments that although repositories are rapidly disseminating crucial pandemic science they are also screening submissions more closely to guard against poor-quality work [6]. Only after a period of reflection will we find out which of the many borderline p values have translated into clinical insight and how much has been nonsense with potential to cause harm.

Scientific publishers have come under considerable criticism over the last decade, with the industry having been called monopolistic and elitist,  demonstrating an extreme form of capitalism that serves to bleed-dry the research it allegedly serves. It is beyond my wit or reason to question the operating profits of Elsevier (£724 million profit in 2011 on £2bn in revenue) or Springer or Wiley – there are others who do it much better [7]. But we should question claims of objectivity and being ‘best in field’ if journals are willing to dump all previously paraded principles for the sake of being trendy. Journals would be wise to consider the words of Alexander Pope in his Essays on Man (1764), “One science only will one genius fit; So vast is art, so narrow human wit”.

References:

1. Cordon MW, Neary JP. Booming sector and de-invidualisations in a small open economy. The Economic Journal 1982; 92:825-48.
2. Adams D. Restaurant at the end of the universe (1980) Pan Books.
3. Trussler M, Soroka S. Consumer demand for cynical and negative news frames. Int J Press Pol, 2014
4. Duyx B, et al. Scientific citations favour positive results: A systematic review and metaanalysis. Clin Epidemiol 2017;88:92-101
5. Lawton G. Science in crisis. New Scientist 9 May 2020: page 12-14.
6. Kown D. How swamped preprint servers are blocking bad coronavirus research. Nature 7 May 2020
7. Monboit G. Academic publishers make Murdock look like a socialist – Guardian, 29 Aug 2011.