People are hardwired to focus more on the negatives in life rather than the positives because paying attention to the former is important for our survival. This is known as negativity bias or positive-negative asymmetry. Verywell Mind notes that individuals who were more attuned to danger were more likely to survive.
Generally speaking, you’re more likely to react to negative events more strongly than to positive ones. It’s also why people tend to want to avoid losing something more than they’re driven to gain something.
In other words, negativity is what we tend to focus on and what drives the decisions that we make. This is one of the reasons why negative news stories get more attention and why people tend to see them as being more truthful (even if they aren’t necessarily).
SYSCA has a massive presence online. On Instagram alone, the project has 3.4 million dedicated followers who eagerly await the latest bits of important news and positive posts.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, the project’s account has garnered over 174k followers and collected a mind-blowing 13.8 million likes across all of its clips.
‘S**t You Should Care About’ presents itself as a media company that “cuts through the bulls**t.” They pride themselves on making the world “accessible and enjoyable” and quip that they have a particular fondness for legendary singer Harry Styles. Initially, the project was launched as a WordPress blog by three best friends “in the back of a political science lecture.”
The team running the project has also published a book, ‘Make It Make Sense: The Bedside Table Essential For Women In Their Twenties.’ What’s more, they also run a whopping two podcasts, ‘The S**t Show’ and ‘Culture Vulture,’ both of which you can find on Spotify.
Media literacy has always been important, but it feels like it’s more vital than ever in this day and age.
These days, claims can go viral on social media lightning-fast because many people (re)share them without checking them, and AI-powered bots are used to spread biased ideas to meet certain groups’ and organizations’ goals. And so, source reliability is a massively important question.
The reality is that unless you have unlimited free time, you probably won’t be able to double-check and cross-reference every single iffy-sounding claim that you find on the internet. So, it’s simply more practical to gauge how (un)reliable a source might be.
The long and short of it is that reliable sources do a lot of fact-checking, reference the sources they rely on for information, are transparent about fixing their mistakes, and don’t try to present opinions as facts.
As we’ve covered before, most ‘legacy media’ organizations follow established journalism standards and are reliable.
Some main examples of trustworthy news sources include the Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, the BBC, CBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, etc.
Some newer media outlets also follow these standards, e.g., ProPublica, the Hill, Vox, Axios, and others.
