Ask The Psychologist Issue #56: Is Karma the Same as What Goes Around Comes Around?
The saying ,”There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” is often attributed to P.T.Barnum, the legendary showman. This concept applies to today’s media, as it did 144 years ago when promoting Barnum’s circus. I’m not saying that today’s media is nothing more than a circus promoting this philosophy, but at times, not far from it.
Barnum initially created and toured his American Museum and eventually in 1881, the Barnum & Bailey Circus. He was a master of attracting attention and believed that even negative publicity could generate buzz and draw people to his attractions. His method of attracting attention is still being used today by major media outlets, including print, television and internet outlets. What has prevailed today is the concept that even bad attention is better than no attention. Some media outlets, at times, fail to recognize this concept and over and over promote non worthy negative and hurtful people, instead of promoting and spending time on people who are positive and constructive members of our society. This is the main reason why I see how the media creates victims in our society. Again, negative publicity is better, in a bad person’s mind, than no publicity.
Years ago, I took a daily newspaper and cut out all the negative stories and advertisements. What I had left was scraps of paper that was not enough to line a garbage can. Therefore, I concluded that negative stories sell papers and sell other media in general. If there are not local negative stories, media will go out of their area or even country to find a tragic story. My conclusion at that time in my career was that people like to learn about other people’s ills, if it is not their own. The media, has over the years, picked up on this tendency and has focused on negative stories. Just recently, there have been two tragic shootings, one in the National Football League’s office building in New York City (7/28/25) and the other at the University of Idaho (Nov 2022) where four students were killed.
In both situations, the criminals received extensive exposure by the media, to the extent that the Idaho killer often received more television screen time than the victims and even at his trial, got two-thirds of the television screen as opposed to the TV host reporting the story
The New York shooter was not alive to get this type of coverage long after the crime. One of the reasons for the brief coverage, besides his death, may be that it was discovered he was on psychiatric medications at the time of the crime (Meds found in his car); such meds have major side effects of suicide and homicide, which both occurred in this case. It’s known that big pharma has crises PR managers, that when needed, work to curtail the knowledge of the side effects of their medications getting out after a shooting, when the shooter was on their Black Box Brain altering psychiatric medications.
One of the most classic examples of how a criminal gets glorified by the media is the case of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on December 4, 2024, in Midtown Manhattan. This accused criminal received so much media attention that the public held demonstrations supporting his crime. He became a media celebrity, even when arrested after the shooting. He was often shown on media news much more than the victim or his family.
So, my conclusion is that negative news stories sell, and the media is primarily about making money. Even when the President of our country develops programs to curb criminal behavior in Washington DC, there are media outlets and political parties trying to stop his efforts. I surely hope part of Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote eventually takes hold in our country, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time”. I also hope people realize the saying, “Karma’s a bitch” which reflects the belief that negative actions will inevitably lead to negative consequences.
(The original phrase ‘Karma is a bitch‘ is a derogatory term that is used to describe Hindu and Buddhist beliefs about karma.).
This type of Negative Karma is occurring currently in some media companies, where some of the more outrageously negative and untruthful news hosts are losing their credibility and jobs. But this is not happening near enough, especially in politics. Another part of Lincoln’s quote may explain why, which stated that “you can fool some of the people all the time”. This quote touches on another of Barnum’s common sayings, “There’s a sucker born every minute”.
So how can so many people be fooled into believing mistruths. A psychological term that may explain this is called expectancy behavior. This occurs when people are led to believe a miss truth and continue to see this miss truth as being correct. An example of this was the study they did in a high school years ago, when they told a teacher that her class for the new year were problem students and another teacher, that her class was exceptionally good students. In fact, the opposite was true. As a result, the students who were expected by the teacher to be good students, actually did better than they ever did and the good students that the teacher was told were problem students, did more poorly than they ever did in the previous year. This is called expectancy behavior, where you’re expecting one thing to happen, without realizing the true facts behind this expectation.
Also, another psychological tool that is used to influence people incorrectly is desensitization, where, people are being told, over and over, for extended periods of time, a mistruth or presented with information that misrepresent right and wrong. An example of desensitization occurring is when people in crime areas are experiencing very high levels of crime repeatedly and become so desensitized to the crime and murders that it doesn’t affect them as much as it should. These people are constantly told there is lower crime even though crime is still extensive. Crime becomes common place, with this being similar to politicians constantly repeating a message that may be false. Over a long period of time, fiction becomes fact, to some of the people that Lincoln and Barnum referred to in the past and stated above.
Bart P. Billings,Ph.D.
COL SCNG-SC, Military Medical Directorate (Ret.)
Licensed Clinical Psychologist CA PSY 7656
Licensed Marriage, Family Therapist CA LMFT 4888
-Director/Founder International Military & Civilian Combat Stress Conference
-Initial Enlisted Ranks and Retired as Medical Service Corps Officer with a total of 34 years in US Army
-Recipient of the 2014 Human Rights Award from Citizens Commission on Human Rights International & The University Of Scranton “Frank O’Hara Award” in 2016.
bartbillings@yahoo.com
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