The Media Fear Machine

An act of violence happens somewhere in the world. Within minutes, millions of people who were nowhere near it can feel threatened. The danger may be distant, but the fear is remarkably close. Psychology is beginning to explain how the news transforms the extraordinary into something that feels frighteningly ordinary.

On April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. For those present, the violence was immediate and devastating. For millions of others, it arrived through television screens, news websites, and a succession of images that seemed impossible to escape. The explosions themselves lasted only moments. Their presence in the media lasted much longer. For days, broadcasts returned to the same frightening images. News organizations followed the investigation, reported developments, revisited what had happened, and offered a steady stream of commentary about what it might mean.

The public had legitimate reasons to pay attention. People wanted to know what had happened, who was responsible, and whether there was continuing danger. But researchers would soon discover something unsettling about the psychological consequences of watching. E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin, and Roxane Cohen Silver surveyed nearly 4,700 Americans in the weeks following the bombings. They compared the psychological responses of people directly exposed to the events with those who had encountered them through the media. Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were striking.

People who reported watching six or more hours of bombing-related coverage each day during the first week showed higher levels of acute stress than those directly exposed to the event, after statistical adjustments. That finding did not mean watching television was equivalent to experiencing a bombing. The study was observational, and people experiencing greater anxiety may also have been more inclined to seek additional coverage. The psychological consequences of direct trauma cannot be reduced to a comparison of survey scores. Nevertheless, the research revealed something important.

An act of violence did not have to occur nearby to become a significant psychological event in someone's life. The news could carry more than information. It could carry fear. And for people who continued watching, the emotional experience of danger could outlast the event itself.

The Mind That Mistakes Familiarity for Frequency

Decades before the Boston Marathon bombings, two psychologists were investigating a peculiar problem in human judgment. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman wanted to understand how people estimated the likelihood of events when they lacked reliable statistical information. Their 1973 paper on the availability heuristic described a mental shortcut that remains central to understanding our relationship with the news. When estimating how frequently something happens, people often rely on how easily examples come to mind. This is not an inherently foolish strategy. Events that occur frequently are often easier to remember. Our minds use accessible memories to make judgments quickly, allowing us to navigate a complicated world without consulting statistics every time we make a decision.

But memory has vulnerabilities. An event can become easy to remember because it is unusual, emotionally intense, visually striking, or repeatedly discussed—not because it is common. Consider the difference between an ordinary day and a spectacular disaster. On any given day, countless people travel safely, return home from work, resolve disagreements, care for their children, and move through their communities without encountering serious danger. Almost none of those experiences becomes news. A single act of extraordinary violence, by contrast, may occupy headlines for days. The viewer encounters the event repeatedly: the original footage, interviews with witnesses, commentary from authorities, updates to the investigation, and discussions about whether something similar could happen again.

Eventually, an image of danger may become more mentally accessible than the countless ordinary experiences that would provide a more complete picture of everyday life. The result is a strange distortion. An event can be statistically rare and psychologically familiar at the same time. The familiarity does not necessarily persuade us that the event is happening everywhere. But it can make danger feel unusually available, unusually near, and unusually relevant to our own lives. The mind knows the images came from somewhere else. The emotional system may respond as though they belong much closer to home.

This helps explain why a person can understand intellectually that a particular danger is unlikely while nevertheless feeling apprehensive about encountering it. Fear is not always corrected by information alone. Sometimes the information itself has helped create the feeling.

The Business of Getting Our Attention

It would be comforting to think the news media developed its appetite for frightening stories through some peculiar failure of modern technology. In reality, the attraction is much older. For generations, journalists have understood that danger, conflict, scandal, and sudden misfortune capture attention. The old newsroom expression if it bleeds, it leads reflects an enduring observation about the kinds of stories audiences notice. But the digital era has made that observation measurable. In 2023, a research team led by Claire Robertson published a study in Nature Human Behaviour examining more than 105,000 variations of online news headlines.

The data came from Upworthy, a website that had experimented extensively with different headlines to discover which versions encouraged people to click. Across thousands of randomized comparisons, the researchers found that negative language increased engagement. For a headline of average length, adding one negative word increased the click-through rate by approximately 2.3 percent relative to the original rate. The effect was modest for any individual headline. Across enormous audiences and millions of impressions, however, even small advantages can matter. The study did not demonstrate that every news organization deliberately manufactures fear. Nor did it show that frightening stories necessarily increase anxiety in everyone who reads them.

What it revealed was an incentive. When negative language makes an article more likely to attract attention, publishers have a measurable reason to favor it. And the effect becomes particularly consequential in a competitive environment where headlines, notifications, videos, and social posts are continually being evaluated according to how successfully they capture an audience. The psychology of the reader and the economics of the publisher begin reinforcing one another. We are attentive to danger because doing so has obvious survival value. News organizations seek attention because attention sustains their work.

A frightening story satisfies both conditions. The result does not require a coordinated attempt to frighten the public. A system of individual decisions—each intended to attract attention, inform audiences, or remain competitive—can produce a collective experience in which danger seems disproportionately present. There is a complication here, however. The researchers' findings also suggest that the audience is not simply being manipulated by external forces. We participate in the process. We click. And the things we choose to click help determine what gets produced, promoted, and repeated.

Why Bad News Gets Under Our Skin

The attraction of frightening information is not only a matter of curiosity. Research suggests that negative news can evoke stronger physiological responses than positive news. In 2019, Stuart Soroka, Patrick Fournier, and Lilach Nir published a study examining how people in seventeen countries responded to television news stories. The researchers measured changes in physiological arousal and attention while participants watched positive and negative news content. On average, negative stories produced stronger physiological reactions. But the researchers also found meaningful individual differences. Not everyone responded in the same way, and the results should not be interpreted as a universal preference for negative information.

Still, the findings help explain why frightening news can be so difficult to ignore. Our attention is not distributed evenly across everything we encounter. Information suggesting danger often seems to demand immediate consideration. We may read a reassuring story with interest and move on. An alarming story can leave us searching for more details. Where did it happen? Could it happen here? How often does this occur? What are the authorities saying? Has anything changed? Every answer may generate another question. And with modern news delivery, another answer is almost always available.

This creates a peculiar relationship between information-seeking and anxiety. A person may return to the news because they feel unsettled and hope that an update will provide reassurance. But the update may introduce another uncertainty, another disturbing detail, or another expert explaining what could happen next. The viewer keeps watching, not necessarily because they enjoy the experience, but because leaving the story unresolved feels uncomfortable. This is one of the reasons continuous coverage differs psychologically from reading a report about an event after it has concluded.

The latter allows us to encounter a relatively complete story. The former invites us to inhabit an unfolding possibility. And possibilities can be especially frightening when their outcomes remain uncertain.

When the World Arrives Without Context

The rise of social media has complicated this relationship still further. In earlier generations, much of the news reached audiences through recognizable publications or scheduled broadcasts. Editors selected stories. Producers determined their order. Newspapers gave readers a beginning and an end, even when coverage continued the next day. Today, an alarming event may arrive between photographs from a friend's vacation, a message from a family member, an advertisement, and a video intended to be funny. The boundary between personal life and public crisis has become remarkably thin.

A person can be enjoying an ordinary morning when an image of catastrophe appears on a screen. There may be no introduction, no explanation of scale, and little indication of whether what is being shown is typical, exceptional, recent, or even authentic. The emotional impact can precede understanding. One influential study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined how verified true and false news stories circulated on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. Researchers Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral analyzed approximately 126,000 stories shared millions of times.

They found that false information spread farther, faster, and more broadly than true information in the dataset. Novelty appeared to be one possible explanation. False stories were often more surprising, and responses to them included emotions such as fear and disgust. The finding is important, although it does not establish that every social media platform operates identically or that all alarming information is false. Rather, it demonstrates how the mechanisms of online sharing can reward information for qualities other than accuracy. A story that surprises or frightens us may be especially likely to become part of someone else's news environment.

And because the event arrives through a social connection or familiar digital platform, it may acquire a sense of immediacy that differs from encountering it in a newspaper. A friend shares a warning. Someone posts a frightening video. Another person adds a personal interpretation. An event that occurred far away begins circulating through the social spaces we inhabit every day. It becomes not merely something happening in the world, but something people around us are discussing. The psychological distance narrows.

The Strange Experience of Knowing Too Much—and Too Little

There is a paradox at the center of modern news consumption. We have access to extraordinary quantities of information about events around the world. Yet knowing more about individual disasters does not necessarily produce a more accurate sense of how the world is functioning. A reader may know intimate details of several violent incidents while having little information about the actual prevalence of violence. They may follow a crisis closely without understanding the broader conditions that produced it. They may encounter dozens of stories about institutional failures while rarely encountering the less dramatic work through which institutions function successfully.

This is not necessarily the result of inaccurate reporting. A frightening story can be entirely true and still contribute to a misleading impression if it is encountered without adequate context. Journalists have legitimate reasons to cover exceptional events. Unexpected disasters, violence, failures of public institutions, and threats to safety often demand scrutiny. The problem arises when the accumulation of exceptional events begins to resemble a description of ordinary life. There is an important difference between knowing that something terrible happened and understanding how likely it is to happen again.

The first is a matter of reporting. The second requires context, comparison, and judgment. The distinction can become difficult to maintain when a person is emotionally affected by what they have seen. Sometimes the images remain more memorable than the statistical information offered alongside them. A frightening event becomes part of how we imagine the world. And after enough such encounters, a person may begin to wonder whether the world itself has fundamentally changed—or whether they have simply become more familiar with its most disturbing possibilities.

The People Who Have Had Enough

By 2026, researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism were observing an increasingly strained relationship between the public and the news. Their annual Digital News Report, drawing on surveys across dozens of markets, found that 42 percent of respondents sometimes or often avoided the news. In 2017, that proportion had been 29 percent. The finding does not mean that all these people had developed anxiety disorders or that news consumption was necessarily harming them. Some simply had little interest in current affairs. Others were selective, avoiding particular subjects or periods of especially intense coverage.

But the researchers identified a familiar emotional theme. People described feeling overwhelmed, discouraged, or powerless when confronted with a seemingly endless succession of distressing events. The same report documented another significant shift. For the first time across the markets surveyed, social media and video networks had overtaken both television and news organizations' own websites and apps as sources of news. More of the public was encountering news within platforms designed to deliver many different kinds of content, where an alarming event could appear without the deliberate decision to seek it out.

This suggests that avoiding the news is no longer as simple as deciding not to watch a nightly broadcast. The news may find us anyway. And avoiding it can carry a psychological cost of its own. People may feel guilty about turning away from events they believe deserve attention. They may worry that disengagement is irresponsible or that being uninformed leaves them vulnerable. The desire to remain a concerned and informed citizen becomes entangled with the desire to protect one's emotional life. It is possible to care deeply about what happens in the world and still find the experience of following it unbearable.

That tension may help explain why news avoidance has become such an important subject for researchers. The difficulty is not merely that people dislike bad news. It is that many feel caught between the responsibilities of knowing and the consequences of continually being exposed.

The World Is More Than Its Worst Moments

There is a temptation, when discussing media-induced fear, to conclude that people should simply consume less news. Sometimes reducing repeated exposure to distressing coverage is reasonable. The research following the Boston Marathon bombings provides a legitimate basis for considering how much traumatic imagery a person needs to encounter. But the larger problem is not solved by retreating from information. Journalism serves essential purposes. It reveals wrongdoing, communicates threats, examines institutions, and helps people understand events that affect their lives. A person who learns about an actual danger may be better prepared to respond to it.

And some frightening information deserves our attention precisely because it is frightening. The question is not whether news should contain distressing material. It is whether we can develop a relationship with information that preserves our ability to understand the world without continually experiencing it as a source of imminent danger. The distinction begins with recognizing what the news is—and what it is not. A collection of events selected because they are unusual, consequential, or alarming is not a representative sample of ordinary human experience. Repeated exposure to an event does not mean that the event is frequently occurring.

An emotionally powerful image is not, by itself, a reliable estimate of personal risk. And the fact that a story has become familiar does not necessarily mean that the danger it depicts is close. These distinctions sound obvious when stated plainly. They are harder to maintain when the screen is showing something horrifying. The work of media literacy involves more than identifying unreliable sources. It includes recognizing how selection, repetition, framing, and emotional intensity shape our impressions even when the information itself is accurate. There is value in seeking coverage that provides context: how an event compares with historical patterns, what evidence is available, what remains uncertain, and whether any meaningful response is possible.

There is also value in widening the range of stories we encounter. Not because positive news should distract us from suffering, but because suffering is not the entirety of human experience. The world contains cruelty and compassion, danger and safety, institutional failure and quiet competence, tragedy and ordinary resilience. A news environment organized primarily around extraordinary events can make that larger reality difficult to see. People may find some sense of agency through meaningful conversation, community involvement, personal growth and positive action. But the more fundamental shift is not a particular activity.

It is learning to distinguish our emotional experience of the news from a complete understanding of the world.

When the Screen Goes Dark

Return to Boston in April 2013. The people who watched hours of coverage were not necessarily behaving irrationally. They were responding to a shocking event that had interrupted an ordinary public gathering and raised legitimate questions about safety. They wanted to understand. Some may have hoped that continued attention would make an uncertain situation feel more manageable. The research suggests that repeated exposure could instead become associated with greater distress. There is something poignant about that possibility. We turn toward information because we want to feel more capable of navigating the world. But under certain conditions, information can leave us feeling less capable, not more.

The screen offers another image, another update, another warning. For a moment, the world seems to consist of nothing else. Yet outside the frame, ordinary life continues. People are going to work, preparing meals, taking children to school, caring for neighbors, solving problems, repairing relationships, and doing the countless unremarkable things through which society holds together. These events rarely become breaking news. Their absence from the headlines does not make them absent from the world. Perhaps this is the most important distinction psychology can offer us.

The fear we experience while watching the news is real. It deserves to be taken seriously. But the feeling that danger is everywhere is not the same as evidence that danger is everywhere. The world we encounter through the news is a carefully selected fraction of the world we inhabit. And when that fraction becomes the whole of what we see, our understanding of reality can begin to resemble our fear of it.

Research and further reading

• Holman, E. A., Garfin, D. R., & Silver, R. C. (2014). Media's role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology.

• Robertson, C. E., et al. (2023). Negativity drives online news consumption. Nature Human Behaviour.

• Soroka, S., Fournier, P., & Nir, L. (2019). Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science.

• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2026). Digital News Report 2026.

• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2025). People are turning away from the news. Here's why it may be happening.

• University of Houston. (2021). The 24-Hour News Cycle.