The World of Real People Versus the World of the Media

The American Dream is alive. America is a great country not because its philosophy is perfect, but because its system gives the most people the most happiness. This article by Michael Medved discusses in detail perhaps one of the most important things you must understand about the defects of information in the information age. The world in which you live is very different than the world that is portrayed in the media. To quote the most relevant part:
Amazingly, these basic numbers (at least 80% reporting overall happiness; less than 20% saying they’re “not too happy”) have remained virtually unchanged for more than thirty years. In other words, bad downturns in the economy, costly wars and terrorist attacks, high crime, or the advance of decadent and dysfunctional culture, can impact our sense of the state of the nation, but these big events and trends do virtually nothing to shake our levels of personal contentment. When we’re worried about the direction of America it’s almost entirely “the other guy” we worry about. How can we explain the contradiction? If our own situation seems so encouraging to most of us, how can we feel so profoundly discouraged about the nation at large? The answer to that question involves the impact of mass media, and the news and entertainment which play a disproportionate role in shaping our sense of the world beyond our immediate surroundings. In the United States today, we don’t get information from the “news business” but rather from “the bad news business.” Disaster and dysfunction regularly rivet our attention; when a plane lands safely, it’s never newsworthy, but if it crashes into a building or it’s high-jacked by terrorists we’ll get comprehensive, obsessive live coverage. We therefore assume that our fellow citizens don’t enjoy the fortunate lives for which most of us feel grateful. We see few news stories about schools except when some demented killer invades a campus; we therefore believe there’s a “rising tide” of school shootings even when statistics show that incidents of violence actually have gone down. If gas prices go up and cause pain everywhere, it becomes a dominant news story; when they go down sharply, the media either dismiss the decrease or else discuss speculation about political motivations and grand, oily conspiracies.
The hate-America crowd basis their arguments on the world as portrayed in the media. It would be a real tragedy if we throw away the best system in human history simply because of our bad choices in entertainment. However, the real issue is the tendency of other institutions, such as academia, to want to reinforce the false media view rather than counter it.