Negativity drives online news consumption – PubMed (nih.gov)

Or, how the news morons cause anxiety and fear, day in and day out:

we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media.

Reading news is bad for your mental health. And that is by design.

News media is garbage, all the way down.

There’s more:

Results show an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000.

…

he chronological analysis of headlines emotionality shows a growing proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines across the studied outlets over the 2000-2019 interval. The prevalence of headlines denoting anger appears to be higher, on average, in right-leaning news outlets than in left-leaning news media.

Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models – PubMed (nih.gov)