![]() ![]() I’ve written my share of pessimistic stories over the past several years no one can accuse me of being a Pollyanna. The second problem with the decline narrative is that it distorts reality. And yet, the 1890s didn’t lead to American decline-they led to the American Century. ![]() Someone alive in 1893-as unemployment surged from 3 percent to almost 19 percent among working-class Americans, as populism rose and spread, as class conflict and horrendous poverty became more rampant-might easily have concluded that this country was coming apart. For example, the current historic moment is frequently compared with the 1890s, another period of savage inequality, rapid technological disruption, pervasive political dysfunction, and controversial waves of immigration. ![]() Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil.īut in all of those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and the prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Many of them believe that radical action, even violence, may be necessary to save it. Streeter observes that it’s not the poorer members of the conservative coalition who are pessimistic it’s the affluent white Republicans who watch Tucker Carlson and believe the nation is on the verge of total destruction. The American right, for instance, finds itself in a state of perpetual apocalyptic alarm these days. In other words, there was a 68-percentage-point gap between the reality people directly experienced in their daily life and the reality they perceived through the media filter.Īccording to Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on poll data, the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people-the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media. 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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