i'm old enough to have seen this cycle play out several times at almost every level of journalism.
Q: Why doesn't [insert name of news organization here] concentrate more on GOOD news?
A: It is easier to get people to recoil from what is bad than move toward what is good.
Q: Why is that?
A: Because people have wildly different opinions about what constitutes "good".
It is easier for any community to agree on what is bad, than to agree on what is good.
That is basic to human nature, and that axiom is especially true right now about the Democratic party.
It is the dilemma at the heart of rox/sux.
Some are quick to praise even baby steps in the right direction by this President. Others look at the list of accomplishments and refuse to characterize it as good news.
Moderately good news is frequently attacked here for being, well, moderate. Could have been better. Not good enough. Didn't go far enough. At best, it gets the faint praise along the lines of This is a good start, but not what what I expected, or not what I voted for, or not what we really wanted, or not what we could have if the Senate had 60 clones of Bernie Sanders and the House had 219 iterations of Donna Edwards and Ed Markey.
I cannot think of one positive political development of the last few years, except maybe for all the recent marriage equality victories, that has not been responded to with that pattern. And even there we occasionally have "not fast enough" popping up.
So good news about what Democrats have said/done tears us apart and inevitably leads to rox/sux.
Bad news about what Republicans have said/done at least allows us to come together for a while and feel some sense of community unity. (I miss Hatemailapalooza.)
To paraphrase Shiz in the jpmassar diary, sometimes the only thing we have in common around here is that we can despise Republicon politics and policies together.
But is that a bad thing?
Community building since the dawn of time has focused on rallying around a common enemy. One reason the Rs have been so successful at the ballot box is that they have created more uniformity in their base by painting individual Democrats as bad guys, turning the noun Democrat into an adjective that can be spit out like a slur, and persuading a large part of the country that the Democratic Party is the enemy (and not just the electoral enemy). Now we are beginning to have some success at rebranding the Republicon party. We have tarnished the label, creating a bunch of Republicon voting "Independents" who don't even want to call themselves Republicons.
We need to do even more pointing out that anyone willing to wear the label Republicon is WAAY out on the crazy branch of the tree. It will have the effect of pulling more Independent voters to the relative sanity of the Blue Team, creating majorities, which we can then move farther to the left over time.
And before anyone goes Godwin in pointing out that the great hate movements in history succeeded by badmouthing the enemy, I point out that great positive movements have also succeeded by doing this. All the great liberation movements in the history of inclusive justice have focused their energies on portraying the oppressor as negative as well as asserting their own positive rights to freedom and equality.
Bottom line: There is NO news organization ANYWHERE that focuses primarily on good news, and certainly no political news service that does so. It is contrary to human nature.
So it is fruitless to hold kos and the front page up to some imaginary standard that does not exist anywhere.
And I would bet that we have a lot more "good news" here than the Red Team has on ANY of their top websites.
If you think there should be more good news on kos, follow the advice in Angie in WA State's diary
If you think Daily Kos should be publishing stories about superior politicians who have taken a stand on an issue dear to your heart? Then find one and write about it, so that the rest of us can read it, and Recommend it, too.
That's how things will change here, on the Front Page, on the Rec List, in the Threads.
I would take that even a step farther.
If you want more good news on kos, take what you have learned here and elsewhere and get out into the community and/or run for office and be the kind of activist that MAKES good news happen.