[sp332]

If law enforcement is on average generating more negative newsworthy incidents than positive ones, then the unbiased thing to do is to publish a proportionally higher number of negative articles. You'd have to weight the incidents by importance and see if they are more likely to publish less important negative articles and less likely to publish more important positive articles.

[rpo3po]

This, too, begins with a false premise: that journalists are equally likely to seek out positive and negative stories, and to give both of them equal importance. That is a naive assumption, unfortunately, and the facts of reporting - bad events make for good copy - prove it entirely false.

[sp332]

It's not false, just oversimplified. I swept all that complexity under the word "newsworthy".

[megablast]

This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

Of course, it is a lot harder to prove if you are saying something different than the truth.

[wtbob]

> This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

I think that's likely to be a lot more difficult than you think: how does an independent observer know what the count of good and bad events is, rather than the count of good & bad published events? The trouble is that if an event isn't published, it's practically invisible to an observer.

This is a related issue to the fact that many sensational crimes are less common today, but perceived to be more common due to over-coverage in the media.