The thing is the fluff piece actually proves this as false. For decades they have advertised a Fluff piece at the end of the news, because that keeps people watching till the end. People only wanted to know about the skateboarding squirrel, or how the firefighter saved a family of hedgehogs. Too much bad news and they stopped watching altogether.
They would not need to manipulate people into watching bad news if that's what people actually wanted.
They may have created a dependency on bad news in our current society, but people didn't get there without intentional manipulation.
And now the internet broke the fluff mechanism. People will just google it during the first commercial break, watch it on youtube, and turn off the news. So the news has to report more and more dire threats to keep viewers hooked.
The thing is the fluff piece actually proves this as false. For decades they have advertised a Fluff piece at the end of the news, because that keeps people watching till the end. People only wanted to know about the skateboarding squirrel, or how the firefighter saved a family of hedgehogs. Too much bad news and they stopped watching altogether.
They would not need to manipulate people into watching bad news if that's what people actually wanted.
They may have created a dependency on bad news in our current society, but people didn't get there without intentional manipulation.
And now the internet broke the fluff mechanism. People will just google it during the first commercial break, watch it on youtube, and turn off the news. So the news has to report more and more dire threats to keep viewers hooked.