But when Gallup asked Americans in January 2022 if they were satisfied with the direction of the country, only 17 percent said they were, down from 69 percent in 2000. When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. This permanent cloud of negativity has a powerful effect on how Americans see their country. The American media have a particularly strong bad-news bias. The stories were negative even when good things were happening, such as schools reopening and vaccine trials.

But in the United States, a stunning 87 percent of the coverage was negative. And in the international media, 51 percent of stories in the first year of the pandemic were indeed negative, according to a 2020 study. If any event deserves negative coverage, the terrible coronavirus pandemic is it. The share of headlines evoking fear surged by 150 percent. So, unsurprisingly, the share of American headlines denoting anger increased by 104 percent from 2000 to 2019. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious.

Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality.

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