Title: If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media | Psychology Today
Headings: If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media
Deborah Serani Psy.D.
If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media
Managing depression requires you to mind your media intake.

Content: This practice is known as stunting or just-add-water reporting. Often, these practices present misleading information and promote anxiety in the viewer. Another pattern in newscasts is that the breaking news story doesn't go beyond a surface level. The need to get-the-story-to-get-the-ratings often causes reporters to bypass thorough fact-checking. As the first story develops to a second level in later reports, the reporter corrects the inaccuracies and missing elements. As the process of fact-finding continually changes, so does the news story. What journalists first reported with intense emotion or sensationalism is no longer accurate. What occurs psychologically for the viewer is a fragmented sense of knowing what's real, which sets off feelings of hopelessness and helplessness — experiences known to worsen depression. An additional practice that heightens anxiety and depression is the news station's use of the crawl, the scrolling headline ticker that appears at the bottom of the television, communicating "breaking news." Individuals who watch news-based programming are likely to see one, two, or even three crawls scroll across the screen.