Calling for a new kind of "Fair and Balanced" reporting

Gregg Easterbrook had an interesting opinion piece in the June 13 WSJ: "Life is Good, So Why Do We Feel So Bad?". He details the various measures according to which life as improved, on average, for a large number of people. He admits areas of life on Earth where there are negative trends, but then asks why the overwhelmingly bad attitude of so many people, the doom-and-gloom reports that we all get at almost every turn, on almost every issue. He describes many of the reasons, before hitting on what I think is the biggest one, the ways news gets reported:

Whatever goes wrong in the country or around the world is telecast 24/7, making us think the world is falling to pieces – even when most things are getting better for most people, even in developing nations. If a factory closes, that's news. If a factory opens, that's not a story. You've heard about the factories Ford and General Motors have closed in this decade. Have you heard about the factories Toyota, Honda and other automakers opened in the U.S. in the same period? The jobs there have solid, long-term prospects.

The relentlessly negative impressions of American life presented by the media, including the entertainment media, explain something otherwise puzzling that shows up in psychological data. When asked about the country's economy, schools, health care or community spirit, Americans tell pollsters the situation is dreadful. But when asked about their own jobs, schools, doctors and communities, people tell pollsters the situation is good. Our impressions of ourselves and our neighbors come from personal experience. Our impressions of the nation as a whole come from the media and from political blather, which both exaggerate the negative.

The latter has never been thicker. Democrats insist Republicans are ruining domestic policy, Republicans insist Democrats are ruining foreign policy. Neither claim is true, but both reflect what we've been conditioned to believe: that America is in much worse circumstances than it actually is.

I really wish this issue would get raised more often. The only time I regularly hear it raised is on Fox News (or other right-leaning news outlets) when they talk about how "good news" stories out of Iraq are being ignored. That is fine, but the issue is far broader than just Iraq. The example given above is a good one: large layoffs are reported on, time and again, but incremental -- or even sudden -- increases in employment by a company are rarely mentioned. Or consider all the news about other negatives in our everyday lives: high gas prices, high food prices, high health care costs, crimes of various kinds, forest fires in California, massive natural disasters in Asia, and on an on.

With apologies to Fox News, wouldn't it be nice if we could get a new kind of "Fair and Balanced" in our news each night (and in newspapers, etc.)? Instead of 95% (my rough estimate) of the news being either negative or trivial/humorous, how about reporting regularly on truly good, life-affirming developments? And I don't mean altruistic, self-sacrifice stories -- those do get covered in various ways, in special news shows and so on. Rather, I mean things like how new inventions save us time and money, or how much value people get from various aspects of the Internet, or how good decisions made by CEOs and other business leaders have led to benefits for employees and stockholders, or how people in the US and some other countries are improving their lives because of the freedoms they have to make a life for themselves. The possible stories here are infinite... alas, I don't predict it will happen anytime soon.