Almost everyone I talked to about researching journalism either sighed or groaned in exasperation. People told me of their frustrations with certain news sources, their shame for not having the capacity to be fully informed, the heavy impact of seeing horrific images on social media, the worry of an increasingly polarized society and the sheer overload of information delivered on endless modes of communication. Many saw it as a necessary evil, that being informed is important and that while they can see what healthy news consumption could be, there’s no direct, simple way to get there.

The world is just a tough place to exist right now with climate change, genocide, war, the rise of authoritarianism, growing inequality and economic uncertainty. To open a newspaper, fire up a podcast, or start up a news app is to invite the issues of the world into your being, digest them, and then be left to sit with your emotions. Beyond the individual level, this harm manifests in greater challenges that are antithetical to a healthy, informed society.

We’re presently living through high inflation, a housing crisis, historically low wages, crippled social services and unchecked climate change. Almost everything a person needs to survive is being strained. It’s all well and good to have access to well-vetted and contextualized information, but when you’re up against the wall of survival, no one has the time, energy or ability to take risks to act.

Given the considerable toll the news has on people’s mental health, it’s clear that people either turn away or suffer to stay informed. By not accounting for these effects, journalism fails to reach its potential, leaving people less interested, less informed and less engaged. A functional democracy requires an informed public, and with an already murky landscape of misinformation, disinformation and social media in a complex and overwhelming digital age, we need a more attuned process for being informed^[1].

I challenge you to read the news and reflect on how it has impacted you after the fact. What were you left with? What did you gain? Are you going to do anything about it?

The Business of Bad News

We’re told journalism exists to help us make sense of the world, to give us the information we need to participate in society, make decisions, hold power accountable. But somewhere between that ideal and your morning doom-scroll, something fundamental broke down and that breakdown is dominoing.

The values of journalism came to define “newsworthiness”: negativity, shock, elites, unexpectedness. These were initially identified in the 1960s as a warning about how news media filtered and distorted the world. Instead, they became an instruction manual. When researchers revisited these patterns fifty years later, almost nothing had changed.

The top news values remain bad news, entertainment and surprise. Audio-visual elements and shareability are modern factors at play, especially as reaching wider audiences depends more and more on social media^[2]. This reveals a duality that journalism’s method and purpose are directed more by audience demands rather than public needs. Rooted in that gap is a system of harm, one built on negativity and distortion. This isn’t a moral failure, but rather a systemic one, born from the need for audiences and their attention to fuel commercial needs. Counting the number of eyes watching and for how long shouldn’t be a sole measure of success.

What people and society want (fast, reactive, emotionally charged content) is antithetical to what people and society need (context, understanding, facts). But understanding this systemic failure requires examining the mechanics of how it operates. If bad news is the top news value, we need to understand whether this negativity is a deliberate choice or something deeper in how we consume information.

Negativity Bias

Studies show a large share of news focuses on negative topics, painting our understanding of the world to be darker and bleaker than it actually is^[3]. One in-depth study using 105,000 headlines on Upworthy found that for each negative word in a headline, the click-through rate increased by 2.3 percent, with each positive word reducing click-through by 1 percent^[4].

Why do we click? Evolutionary theory suggests that attention to negativity was advantageous for survival, alerting us to potential dangers^[5]. News agencies simply provide for this human demand. But in a digital age, this biological quirk fuels a cycle of negativity geared towards exploiting our emotions rather than informing our minds^[6].

Digital Overload

Richard Saul Wurman said that “a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England”^[7]. Today, the abundance of information has increased exponentially. Information overload occurs when informational input exceeds human processing capacity^[8], directly contributing to poor mental health through stress and the pressure of constant connectivity.

Given how much information we process, the negativity of that information, our evolutionary pull towards negative news and the framework of newsworthiness that drives journalism, it’s no wonder that it is impacting people’s mental health. De Hogg and Verboon concluded that “daily exposure to everyday news facts makes people feel bad, especially when they consider the news to be personally relevant”^[6].

These structural conditions, like the commercial drive for attention, our biological attraction to threat, and the sheer volume of information, set the stage for harm. But what does that harm actually look like when it manifests in our daily lives?

The Human Toll

Consumption of negative news has been associated with anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), effects that impact even those not directly involved in the events being reported^[8]. The “consumption of news media increases depression, helplessness, distrust, and anxiety, and reduces perceptions of others as altruistic and well-meaning, leading consumers to focus upon their own security and less upon others, and to experience apathy, denial, and fatalism”^[9].

“Headline stress disorder” encompasses a variety of mental health issues where negative headlines can cause panic-like symptoms and even physical symptoms that impact your immune and gastrointestinal systems. This term was coined by Steven Stosny to describe the feelings of many of his patients whose engagement with online news led to anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and a sense of having no control over events affecting their lives^[10].

The visual nature of social media exacerbates this through “doomscrolling,” the act of endlessly consuming negative news online, which creates a cycle of secondary traumatic stress and increased mental distress^[11]. Children and younger people are particularly vulnerable, often lacking the worldview to contextualize events, leading to a sense that distant threats are imminent^[8].

News Avoidance and Apathy

As people navigate these impacts, they develop defense mechanisms. The most common is simply turning away. Higher levels of news fatigue and being upset by the news cause news avoidance^[12]. Those who avoid the news are significantly less involved in civic, political or voting activities compared to those who are more regularly informed^[12].

The outcome of consuming news is antithetical to the intention of news where “bad news creates a self-fulfilling prophecy effect whereby the expectation that things will be bad leads to passivity and reduces motivation to act positively”^[13]. Between 2019 and 2024, news avoidance jumped from 32 percent to 39 percent worldwide^[14]. Prolonged exposure to anxiety-inducing news causes desensitisation over time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, “increased threat conveyed in COVID-19 news…diminished public anxiety, despite an increase in COVID-19–related deaths”^[15].

Conclusion

This isn’t a story about individual weakness or failure. If reading the news makes you feel anxious, exhausted, or helpless, that’s not a personal failing. It’s a predictable outcome of a system designed to capture attention rather than cultivate understanding.

News avoidance is climbing, trust in media is collapsing, and the shared reality necessary for democratic participation is fragmenting. We’ve created a paradox: staying informed requires enduring psychological harm, but turning away leaves us vulnerable to misinformation and disengagement from civic life. Neither option is sustainable.

But recognizing the problem is the first step toward imagining alternatives. What if the systems we build could account for human well-being while still fulfilling journalism’s core mission? The tools exist. The research exists. What’s missing is the will to prioritize human well-being over commercial imperatives. That’s the work ahead.

This essay is adapted from my MA thesis exploring how we might redesign news consumption for mental health.

References

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