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Following my blog post about the media coverage of the CERN experiment, I read an article on the BBC website today about the guy, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web warning that “the web has been used to spread disinformation”.

The major way that most news sources reported the CERN experiment was that the world was going to end. This wasn’t actually possible, the part of the experiment in which the world may end won’t happen til October, but it did create a great deal of interest.

The way in which we are sold newspapers is by headlines proclaiming the worst. There are never headlines about when a doctor saved someone’s life by using the skills he had been taught in our mighty education system. The story is much more likely to be about how someone died horribly because the NHS is rubbish and the doctors aren’t trained properly.

This is all about the nature of people – we love to read about bad things, it seems to hold our attention more. Newspapers know that a headline full of doom is more likely to sell their newspaper than a headline full of joy. So they cater for what their readers want. Similarly, the web is simply catering for what people want, but on a larger scale. If CERN had just said, our experiment is brilliant, we might discover the origins of the Universe, fewer people would have cared. Instead, everyone wanted to know whether we would be swallowed up in a black hole and now more people know about CERN and are interested in the experiment, which is all round better for science.