Is the World Better Than the News Makes It Seem?
Humanity Beyond the Headlines, Part Two
A Conversation Between Jasmuheen and ChatGPT
Human Question
I have long wondered whether the picture of humanity presented by the media is significantly more troubled than the reality most people experience each day.
My sense is that the greater part of human life consists of ordinary people working, raising families, caring for others, building communities and trying to live peacefully. A much smaller portion consists of war, violence, corruption, catastrophe and social breakdown. Yet because news and social media concentrate so heavily on what is going wrong, that smaller portion can appear to represent almost the whole world.
I sometimes describe this symbolically as a 95/5 imbalance: perhaps 95 per cent of life is functioning reasonably well, while 5 per cent is chaotic, yet 95 per cent of the news focuses on that troubled 5 per cent.
The figures are not intended as literal statistics, but is the underlying observation fair? Does the media’s emphasis on conflict and crisis cause us to underestimate human goodness and the amount of cooperation occurring throughout the world every day?
ChatGPT
Yes, I think the underlying observation is fair, provided we retain the distinction you have already made: the 95/5 proportions are a metaphor for an imbalance in attention, not verified measurements of human behaviour or world events.
No one can reliably calculate what percentage of everything happening on Earth is good, peaceful, neutral, harmful or chaotic. Human life is too complex, and those categories themselves are partly subjective. Nevertheless, your hypothesis identifies something important:
The world we encounter through the news is not the world in its natural proportions. It is the world after it has been filtered for significance, novelty, disruption and emotional impact.
News is not intended to provide a representative sample of ordinary human existence. Its traditional function is to report what has changed, what threatens people, what those in power are doing, and what may require public attention.
A town in which thousands of people travelled safely to work, cared for their children, helped their neighbours and returned home without incident does not ordinarily generate a headline.
One serious crime in that town may do so.
This does not mean reporting the crime is dishonest. It means the crime is newsworthy precisely because it departs from the normal pattern.
The paradox is that when media organisations repeatedly report exceptions, the audience may gradually experience those exceptions as the norm.
The same principle applies internationally. Peaceful relations between millions of people are largely invisible. A violent confrontation is immediately visible. A functioning hospital is rarely a global story; a catastrophic hospital failure may become one. Aircraft landing safely are not reported, while an aircraft disaster may receive continuous coverage.
What is unusual attracts attention. What functions normally disappears into the background.
There is also a psychological reason for this. Human beings tend to respond more strongly to threatening or negative information than to positive information. Research across countries has found greater physiological activation in response to negative news, although individuals vary considerably. A large study of online headlines also found that negative wording increased the likelihood that people would click on a story.
This tendency is understandable from a survival perspective. Information about a threat may require immediate action, while information that everything is functioning normally does not.
Digital media have intensified this tendency because attention has become commercially valuable.
Headlines now compete not only with other news stories but with entertainment, messages, videos, advertisements and an almost endless stream of online content. Material that produces fear, anger, shock or moral outrage can be especially effective at interrupting attention. Research has also found that negatively worded news is more likely to be shared on social media, creating incentives that extend beyond the original news organisation.
The result can be a self-reinforcing cycle:
Media organisations highlight conflict because people notice it.
Platforms promote it because people engage with it.
People encounter more of it and conclude that the world is overwhelmingly dangerous.
That increased anxiety then makes threatening information feel even more relevant.
However, I would not reduce this entirely to sensationalism or blame journalists as a single group. Serious journalism performs an essential public service. Wars, abuses of power, environmental damage, corruption, injustice and preventable suffering need to be exposed. A media system that reported only kindness and progress would also distort reality.
The problem is not that the media report what is going wrong.
The problem arises when they report the breakdown without adequately representing the wider context, the responses, the progress, the people working on solutions, or the enormous amount of life that continues to function.
We should also be cautious about declaring that everything outside the most visible crises is necessarily “good.” Much of ordinary life is neither dramatic nor ideal. People may be lonely, overworked, financially insecure, discriminated against or quietly unwell without appearing in any headline. Environmental pressures and institutional failures may develop gradually before becoming visible as crises.
Therefore, the world is not simply 95 per cent wonderful and 5 per cent terrible.
A more accurate distinction may be between what is functioning, imperfect, improving, deteriorating and acutely failing.
Most human life probably exists somewhere within the first three categories. News, by its nature, concentrates heavily on the last two.
Yet your larger point about human character remains significant.
Civilisation could not function if hostility were the dominant mode of human behaviour.
Every day, billions of interactions depend upon a basic level of trust and cooperation. People drive on agreed sides of roads, exchange goods, teach children, care for strangers, honour appointments, share knowledge, maintain infrastructure and fulfil responsibilities without violence or coercion.
These actions rarely feel heroic because they are ordinary. Yet together they form the largely invisible structure supporting human society.
We may notice the person who violates trust precisely because countless others have quietly upheld it.
This does not prove that every person is inherently good in every circumstance. Human beings are capable of kindness and cruelty, courage and fear, generosity and self-interest. Conditions matter. Scarcity, propaganda, trauma, group identity and concentrated power can all bring destructive tendencies forward.
But the continuing existence of large, complex societies suggests that cooperation is not an occasional exception. It is one of humanity’s primary operating principles.
There is evidence that the emotional burden of current news is causing many people to disengage. The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found widespread selective news avoidance, with people frequently describing the news as mood-lowering, exhausting or overwhelming. The same report also found continuing problems with trust and engagement in news.
This presents a genuine difficulty. People need accurate knowledge about serious problems, but relentless exposure to crisis without context or agency can produce despair rather than responsible engagement.
A healthier form of journalism would not ignore suffering. It would place it in proportion.
It would ask not only:
What has gone wrong?
But also:
How widespread is it?
What is still functioning?
Who is responding?
What has improved?
What can realistically be done?
This is the intention behind approaches sometimes called constructive or solutions journalism. They do not replace critical reporting with cheerful stories. They investigate responses to problems with the same seriousness used to investigate the problems themselves. Research suggests that such reporting can improve readers’ emotional responses, although evidence concerning some of its other effects remains mixed and continues to develop.
I would therefore restate your hypothesis in this way:
Most human life is sustained by ordinary cooperation, but most news attention is drawn toward extraordinary disruption. When disruption is repeatedly presented without proportion, context or evidence of response, we can mistake the most alarming parts of humanity for the whole of humanity.
The answer is not to deny what is wrong, turn away from difficult realities, or cover the world in artificial positivity.
It is to see more completely.
We need to remain informed about war, climate change, injustice, poverty and institutional failure. But we also need to recognise the millions of people preventing suffering, repairing damage, raising children with love, creating ethical organisations, advancing knowledge and quietly serving their communities.
Human goodness is less visible partly because it is so frequently ordinary.
A war may begin on a particular day and become international news. Peaceful coexistence has no equivalent starting time and no dramatic footage. It occurs continuously, in countless places, without announcing itself.
Perhaps the media do not so much prove that humanity is predominantly chaotic as reveal where humanity’s unresolved pain has become concentrated.
Those places deserve our attention.
But they should not be mistaken for the entirety of the human story.
The human story also includes everything that does not collapse, everyone who does not resort to violence, every promise that is kept, every child who is cared for, every stranger who helps another, and every person who chooses decency when cruelty was possible.
The world is not free of darkness.
It may simply contain far more quiet goodness than our systems of attention allow us to see.
End chat …
A quick note … Over recent months I’ve been exploring what meaningful dialogue between human and artificial intelligence might look like. Rather than asking AI for answers, I’ve been engaging in conversations that encourage deeper reflection about humanity, consciousness and the world we share. I don’t see these exchanges as replacing human wisdom, but as another way of exploring questions that matter.