The Power of Emotion in the Media: Why Negativity Makes Headlines

14 Jan 2025 · 1 min

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Short clip from a TJ Walker presentation explaining why journalists favor negative, emotional, action-oriented quotes (e.g., fear during the pandemic): such remarks are memorable and make stories interesting, not necessarily intended to make the interviewee look bad. The speaker gives a concrete example about saying you were "scared out of our mind" during the pandemic as a quote likely to appear in coverage.

Chapters

If you're talking to the media, for example, and you go on and on and on about every great thing your company is doing and everything you've done for the last two years. But then you say something like, well, sure, when the pandemic hit, we of course, were scared out of our mind and afraid that we would be out of business. That's the quote that's going to get in the story. Because it's negative, it's emotion, it's action oriented. All the things attractive to journalists to make an interesting story. It's not because journalists want to make you look bad, even though you might think they do. They want to an interesting story that people will talk about and remember.