By Larry Olmstead

Human resource managers from around the nation convened last week in Las Vegas, a desert venue that seemed fitting given one speaker’s remedy for addressing negativity in the workplace: Put your head in the sand.

Steve Gilliland, a consultant and motivational speaker from Pittsburgh, didn’t exactly use those words, of course. His point was simple – what goes into your brain comes back out, reflected in actions and attitude. If you want to have a positive attitude, surround yourself with positive people and positive thoughts.

Therefore, Gilliland told a standing-room only audience of about 1,500 at the annual Society of Human Resource Management conference, a key to managing negativity was to avoid the news.

 “I haven’t read a newspaper in years,” he said. He makes sure to avoid TV news – why would he want to know about all those horrific things that happened elsewhere, he asked, since there was little he could do about them except pray? Gilliland went on to explain that the media only focus on the negative, because it sells.

Having spent more than three decades in and around media, I admit that these sentiments – referenced several times during Gilliland’s 75-minute presentation – got my back up. Of course, I have heard them before. I have always wondered: How can someone know that newspapers only focus on the negative if they don’t read them? I also wonder: If mainstream media focus on the negative “because it sells,” how come newspaper circulation has been in a 30-year slide?

That said, Gilliland’s point of view is worth serious reflection. In fact, there IS a lot of depressing news out there – and there are some producers in broadcast, and a few editors in mainstream print, who think lurid news brings bigger audiences. And news executives shouldn’t kid themselves: Millions of Americans think as Gilliland does. At least some of them have voted with their feet, abandoning newscasts and newspapers.

But the “media focus on the negative” truism has become a convenient way for people to skirt past a complex set of societal dynamics. Analyze any mainstream paper carefully. You will find a mix of good news, bad news, uplifting tales and just sheer information, much of it very useful to the audience. Few newspapers get into the gutter; most mainstream papers veer more closely to “boring” than “sensationalistic.”

Regardless of media, the human condition is such that each of us faces challenges. Pretending they don’t exist creates its own set of problems.  Each of us deals with negative circumstances differently. For some, walling ourselves from current events may be the right move. But I cannot imagine that workplaces would be any less negative if no one watched TV or read newspapers. They would simply be less capable, and more ignorant.