My mother (whom I may have previously mentioned as working for CBS News) often repeats the ever-popular maxim of many journalists: "if it bleeds, it leads." Certainly one can easily observe that news articles concerning tragedies and horrific incidents are far more attractive to the public than stories on equally-important, yet more placid story topics. This, however, does not answer the question at hand: namely, which of the two "aspects" of news stories contains greater intrinsic worth, "good" news, or "bad" news?
One must first ask what constitutes "good" or "bad" news. I find that only in rare instances do newsworthy stories occur where at least one party does not suffer some detrimental effect because of the event in question. News is always "bad" to someone, even if it is only a single person. Thus "good" and "bad" are just relativistic terms borne of the reading public's frequent inability to grasp all sides of a story, usually due to the ever-increasing pace of journalism in the modern world which leads to the general public holding a continually less firm grasp on the details of journalistic stories. The question then becomes even more broad: what sort of news story is worth writing?
Simply put, "good" news is not inherently "better" than "bad" news, and vice-versa. Rather, it is the number of people which the story could potentially affect (positively or negatively) which determines its eventual relevance. A journalist wants to write a story which will be accessible and comprehensible to a large number of people, unless writing for some sort of specialty column, but such instances are the exception rather than the rule. The value of a news story depends almost entirely on who will actually end up reading the story; the audience must, in a way, write the script.
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I definitely agree with what you have said. Every story is going to effect someone somewhere, it's just a question of who and where. The media wants to tell the audience things that are important to them, so I agree with your statement claiming that the audience must, in a way, write the script.
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