“Good news is rare these days,” Hunter Thompson wrote of a truth that manages to keep being true, “and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond.” It’s a vintage insight that has only gained relevance in the age of Twitter and memes and jokes like “today was a long week”: The American media may have a reputation for reveling in tragedy—the familiar indictments of disaster porn—but they also have a bias toward the very thing CNN was offering when it shared the story of Jimena Madrid while emphasizing cookies and coloring books: We denizens of the current news cycle are in constant need of happy things. We will look for them even in—especially in—the stories that are, manifestly, tragic. [...]
The reporter, in this, might also be describing the feelings of the viewer. In a time of hard news, in every sense, the stories of family separations have been, after all, particularly challenging: kids in cages. A baby torn away by government agents from her mother’s breast. A father who killed himself when faced with the possibility that he would never see his family again. The wailing of small children. And so: When CNN tells its audience that one of those sobbing children has been reunited with her mother, it is not just providing a happy ending; it is also offering reassurance to a flagging public that the story overall is, indeed, coming to its conclusion. It is offering tacit permission to look away, to stop paying attention, to stop investing and feeling and caring. The arc has ended, after all; the reunion has happened; they are hoping the sadness and separation are behind them. [...]
In 2009, Barbara Ehrenreich published her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, the journalist detailed how biased Americans are toward optimism—in the best ways as well as the worst. She documented how unwilling and unable we can be, as a culture, to grapple with things that are difficult and scary and manifestly sad. She documented our great ability to look away. “We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles,” Ehrenreich wrote, in summary, “both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”
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