> Perhaps they are, but news also heavily sensationalizes and dramatizises in order to sell clicks.

I don't think that's true if you choose your news with even a modicum of care. Read the Economist, and you won't ever hear of starving children. Unless they become statistically relevant, which points to certain problems with the wish for "positive news".

In other quality outlets, you're more likely to read the human-interest stories of crime & suffering. But there's still a vast difference to the blatant exploitation of emotion by tabloid.

That's most pronounced in the decision what to cover, and how much space to devote to it: national newspapers do not splash gruesome sex crimes on A1. They do get mentioned when they rise above what happens every day, but receive treatment in proportion to their relevancy.

You can argue that some terrorist attack is not relevant to your life, because the chance of dying under such circumstances is still astronomically low. But by that standard, almost everything is irrelevant: once a story becomes directly relevant to you, you're also likely not care about the reports of it very much. Not just for the punny reason that you are dead, but also (if you're less directly involved) because you no longer need to be informed of the event.

That little contradiction proves the wisdom of the media's long-standing approach: they set a low bar, and let readers decide which articles to spend time with.

There's also an obvious analogy with schooling here: you're unlikely to ever need 90% of what you learn in school. But that's a rather terrible argument against today's curricular, because, as it turns out, everybody ends up needing 10%, and those 10% rarely overlap.

Similarly, it'd be a mistake to restrict your news coverage to what's immediately relevant to your life. At the very least, you need some information on what's going on within the wider community every two years when you're asked to make an informed decision at the ballot box. Because if you don't know what's going on, the only feedback loop connection politicians' careers with their actions is gone.

People often struggle with this connection: the act of voting is so small and rare, and I am just one of so many. In that way, one feels entirely powerless. But acting on that impression and shutting out bad news, or not voting, still represents a grave dereliction of duty. Because collectively, that minor act is all of it, representing roughly 100% of the legitimacy of democracy. It does not even take 100% of people to abstain from getting involved to turn a society into a banana republic: once participation drops below, say, 80%, you start to see a roughly proportional increase in appeals to some supposed "silent majority" supporting every minority candidate or opinion.

As a final observation, I'll point to the NYT long-form features such as [0] to show that quality media does a far better job of grappling with the nuance and contradictions of life. I think there's vastly more excellent journalism out there than people acknowledge, and disparaging the "mainstream media" with the accusation of shoehorning facts into a single, collectively-decided narrative is itself an illegitimate generalization. To use an example that's not the elephant in the room, look at the US' changing attitudes toward drug dependency for an example of the political process working better than most people give it credit for: we are today seeing the inflection point of a decades-long process relying on the initiative by people on the ground and, often in a feedback loop, journalists giving them the light of day changing the collective story ("narrative") from crime to disease. You and I may believe we came up with our opinions on this (and any other) issue completely independently, and through a logical process combining stringent empiricism with sound principles. But that's sort of just being a fish ignorant to the water around them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/dying-alone-in-n...