I’m not sure about this, but I think there’s a pretty good and absolutely foregone conclusion that the world is actually extremely fucked up in new ways, growing in metastatic ugliness every year, and that it really is this Bad News that people are turned off by.

To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.

I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.