Here is the news: it’s usually bad – and that’s bad for us | Simon Jenkins

I used to believe that the media’s diet of misery was good for the morale of ordinary people. Not any more

If it bleeds, it leads. Fear projects. Bad news sells. Failure makes the front page, success goes to the back. So what is it this week with so many headlines about the Queen? I recall an edict once coming down from a newspaper proprietor that the boss was “fed up with so much bad news”. He wanted a “good-news paper”. We duly prepared a spoof front page. It reported: “No crashes at Heathro...