Fairly recently, a Methodist minister bought the domain gayfarmer.co.uk and used it to setup a website to help with his ministry to gay farmers. The minister was charged with developing ministries for rural people, and soon realised that there were a number of farmers across the UK who struggle with their homosexuality, and it would be nice if someone could do something to help them. Now, it is nothing huge, it is not going to change the world, but its interesting and its nice to see someone identifying a problem and trying to solve it. But this got me thinking: how come when the Westborough Bapists in America waive their hate-filled placard it seems to make international news, but when a British Methodist minister does something nice it doesn’t?

I’d love to chalk it all up to media-anti-Christian bias and play the ‘woe-is-me’ card, but I really don’t think it is. The sad truth is that bad news is more generally more interesting that good news. Sure, when Prince William got married there was plenty of press coverage, but his wedding will never eclipse Dianna’s death as far media lore goes. Indeed, unless you do something exceptionally nice, a la Mother Theresa, people rarely notice, and if they do it still isn’t very interesting. Mother Theresea’s life of niceness seemed to pale in comparisons with Princess Dianna’s life of luxury when both died around the same time.

And not only do we like bad news, we like it even more when there is someone to blame. The Westborough Baptists are perfect because we point our fingers at them and say: “Ah-ha! It’s them! They are the ones to blame!”. When a minister does something to help gay farmers, there just no blame involved. It’s just a guy helping other guys. When Willy and Kate get married, there is no fault involved. We love fault. It makes us feel better, and that makes it more interesting.

This is not something we can blame the media for either. Sure, the media loves bad news and finger pointing as much as everyone else, but isn’t the best gossip usually a mix of bad news and finger pointing “oh, did you hear about so and so. I told her that’d happen.”

I don’t think there is a lot we can do to stop people from liking bad news, or finding someone to point their finger at. But I do think we can remember that people like to find fault and they like bad news, so when it seems like everything – and everyone – is shit, it helps to remember that we love bad news and fault finding, and as such we often look for it while failing to see all the good stuff that is always happening around us. There is nothing wrong with liking bad news, just remember that there is a lot of good news out there too.