This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.
No, it will continue until it stops generating revenue. It is our appetite for this sort of journalism that feeds it; if all the journalists in the world suddenly stopped writing fear-baiting stories, then someone else would start writing those stories to fill the void.
The journalists aren't the ones with the addiction; it is their readers that have the addiction.
