Also the article focuses on murders on TV, but I personally find the sanitized "A-team like" violence where people get beat up all the time, but nobody ever dies, worse. What conclusions should a kid take from viewing a steady diet of that.
The book Factfulness makes a pretty good case that people generally think the world is falling apart but that objectively the world is currently in better shape than any other period of history.
As far as a controlled experiment - this is anecdotal, but I tend to feel less safe outside at night if I have been spending more time inside watching the news or consuming social media. I tend to feel more safe outside at night when I have been spending time disconnected from those trying to tell me how the world is.
The book, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler also makes the same point about how focusing on the negative can obscure the good that is happening in the world.
https://www.diamandis.com/blog/the-world-is-still-better-tha...