By Dom Serafini
The expression is: “There are always two sides to every story.” But if one counts fake news, there might even be three. To avoid fake news, consumers are advised to stick to traditional media. For example, in the U.S., print media entities that can be trusted include The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in New York, The L.A. Times in Los Angeles, The Herald Tribune in Miami, and The Washington Post in Washington D.C.
For TV, one should stick to both the local and national news from the TV networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). On radio, one can trust NPR.
But conscious of the fact that there are two sides to every story, I tend to also keep up with European TV news, especially from Il Messaggero, a daily Italian print newspaper for which I contribute from New York City. I also watch the TV news from La7, a national private Italian channel with its TG7 news show, mainly to find out which government rules at the moment in Italy.
I tend to tune in to TG7 just after the U.S. TV networks’ nightly news, and what immediately pops out are the different outlooks. While TV news in the U.S. tends to be more positive (except for the weather service), the news at TG7 is constantly on a doomsday alert. This doomsday outlook is also shared by a good number of people in the U.S., so much so that a recent Wall Street Journal headline read: “The World Isn’t Going to Hell, But Many People Feel That way.”
The Journal quoted Adam Mastroianni, author of a study titled “The Illusion of Moral Decline,” who declared that humans “have a negative bias.”
According to the Journal, humans have been complaining about social decline since Jeremiah in the Old Testament. In the Journal‘s story, Richard Eibach, a Canadian psychologist, stated that “being in a role of responsibility makes people hyper-responsive to misconduct. [But] we don’t realize that the world didn’t change — we did.”
Now, the task for viewers is to trick TG7 reporters with some fake news about the good state of the world’s affairs so that they can report more balanced, real news.
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