Since we are currently in a global pandemic that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the closure of stores, restaurants, and other hallmarks of normal life, it’s not surprising many people are searching for things to take their minds off the gloom. And what they are clinging to—and sharing on social networks—is often explicitly “good news,” be it heartwarming stories about kids having virtual birthday parties where friends drive by and honk their horns, or people banging pots and pans to celebrate healthcare workers. There’s even a “news network” dedicated to this kind of thing, although it’s a tongue-in-cheek take on the genre. It’s a YouTube channel that features actor and filmmaker John Krasinski, best known for his role in the sitcom The Office, sitting at a desk in what appears to be his den, dressed in a suit and hosting a show he calls Some Good News, complete with a hand-painted sign that reads sgn (drawn by his children). He throws to video clips and does live interviews, just like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert, but the purpose is to be uplifting, not satirical.

Krasinski’s show may be the most recent example, but it’s far from the only one. Musician David Byrne, cofounder of Talking Heads, launched a site last year called Reasons to Be Cheerful (a name taken from a song by British musician Ian Dury) that he said was designed to give people reasons for hope, as opposed to the bleak landscape that traditional news offers. Byrne has described it as “part magazine, part therapy session, part blueprint for a better world.” He told Rolling Stone magazine he wanted to give people something to make them feel better about the world. “It often seems as if the world is going straight to Hell. I wake up in the morning, I look at the paper, and…often I’m depressed for half the day,” he said. Mother Jones magazine has a newsletter that focuses on positive news called Recharge, and the Washington Post has a similar newsletter filled with “inspiring” stories called The Optimist. Before it became synonymous with clickbait headlines, the digital news aggregator Upworthy was designed to distribute feel-good stories via social media.

It seems churlish to even question this trend, because it’s so clearly designed to be heartwarming. Who doesn’t want their heart warmed, especially when we are all marinating in a stew of fear and despair? And even if someone didn’t want their heart warmed, what kind of monster would begrudge someone else having theirs warmed? Especially if it’s by a little girl being serenaded by the entire cast of Hamilton because she couldn’t make it to the real Broadway show. Watching that kind of gesture—as calculated or orchestrated as it might be—touches a very human place in us, just like watching kittens play with string, or seeing a child do something adorably dumb. When I shared a short video clip of a spring stream flowing through the woods near my house recently, several people I don’t even know thanked me profusely for it, as though I had offered them a drink after days of crawling through the desert.

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Is there anything wrong with that feeling? Of course not. But the fact that Krasinski’s show apes the design and structure of a regular TV news program implies that it’s intended, in part, as an antidote to the real thing, because regular news is too depressing and negative. Is that true? Perhaps. Covering death day after day does get depressing. But what is the alternative—to not report on what is happening because it will make people sad? Psychologist Steven Pinker has said that he believes the news media deliberately exaggerates bad or negative news. He likes to point out that we never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out.” And it is true that some news shows seem to take a perverse delight in car-crash-style journalism, highlighting murder and arson whenever possible. (It’s also true that we are drawn to bad news, as much as we might like to deny it.)

The problem is that the whole point of the news is to inform people about the world, to give them the knowledge of events that might affect them. And a lot of that knowledge involves depressing things like viruses, or quarantines, war, and death. Is it nice to have a respite from that? Of course. Even journalists need to take breaks, as CNN reporter Brian Stelter admitted he had to do recently, after getting overwhelmed by the relentlessness of coronavirus coverage. But a focus on only good news could easily turn into escapism, if it involves deliberately avoiding the truth in favor of something that feels better, because it implies that the world is just fine the way it is, and therefore nothing needs to change. That’s a little too close to the “bread and circuses” the ancient Romans provided as a way to keep the populace in line.

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Here’s more not-so-good news:

Avoidance : In a recent Outline essay, writer Joanna Mang noted that feel-good stories, like a much-shared video of a police officer knotting a teenager’s tie outside his high school graduation ceremony, often evade certain uncomfortable questions . “Positive news is necessarily regressive because it does not identify, much less critique, systemic problems or injustices,” Mang writes. “On the contrary, it often elides and obscures conflict; in fact, that’s one of its main appeals. That video I mentioned earlier, of the police officer and the high schooler who needed help with his graduation outfit? The cop is black, the teen is white, and it takes place in Georgia.”

Not good : In what turned out to be a rather disheartening social experiment, a Russian news site called City Reporter only reported good news to its readers for an entire day in 2014. The site put positive news stories on the front of all its pages, and found as many silver linings in any potentially negative stories as it could (“No disruption on the roads despite snow,” for example). As Quartz described it , “the result was a smorgasbord of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows—that absolutely no one wanted to read.” The City Reporter lost two-thirds of its normal readership that day, according to a post by one of the editors on Facebook.

Solutions : Although it might seem related to the good-news trend, so-called “solutions journalism” is designed to focus more on what people can do about a particular problem, according to its proponents—giving readers resources to effect positive change. “The solution is not to produce more positive news but to create more knowledge, to truly understand how the world works, what forces are at work in terms of trying to address problems,” David Bornstein, cofounder of the Solutions Journalism Network, told CJR in 2014 . “It’s not more awareness about problems, or even outrage, but: What can we do about it?”

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Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.