Derek Thompson’s assertion that 2025 was “an exceptional year for America” rests on stark evidence: traffic fatalities fell by 12.4%, opioid overdose deaths dropped 19% from their 2024 peak, and the national murder rate hit its lowest point since 1975. Yet these numbers, compiled in the Human Progress database, remain buried while headlines scream about “crises.”
The skew between lived experience and media narrative sharpens with data from the 2022 University of Pennsylvania study, which found U.S. news headlines 314% more likely to convey fear, anger, or disgust than in 2000. This “contagion of negativity,” as Marain Tupy terms it, is not accidental. Algorithms favor clicks, and clicks favor outrage—traffic to news sites spiked 22% in 2025 for articles containing words like “war” or “bankruptcy,” per the Pew Research Center.
Human Progress’s 1,084 positive 2025 updates—such as the 37% drop in Indian poverty or the UK’s puffin population rebound—are not mere outliers. They reflect systematic shifts. Yet only 7% of major U.S. outlets covered these stories, Blockworks found, compared to 68% coverage of the “affordability crisis,” a term now codified into financial jargon despite The Economist’s analysis showing real purchasing power gains for 73% of Americans.
The omission matters. By prioritizing clicks over context, newsrooms distort public perception. Consider Gallup’s 2025 poll: 81% of Americans rate their personal lives as “excellent” or “good,” but only 8.7 million tweets mention this statistic versus 85 million lamenting “doom.” This dissonance breeds apathy—Congress’s recent 87% approval of bipartisan infrastructure spending bills went unmentioned, drowned out by polarized media echo chambers.
The unexamined voices here are the communities directly benefiting from the “positive anomalies.” The Gallup data includes rural farmers in Iowa who saw crop insurance premiums cut 34%, yet no mainstream outlet quoted a single farmer describing how this averted generational debt.
What’s next? Media reformers advocate for algorithmic transparency, but the Federal Communications Commission’s 2026 agenda lists “balanced reporting” as a low-priority item. Meanwhile, platforms will likely double down on doomscrolling—Meta predicts a 15% revenue boost in Q1 2026 from news partnerships exploiting “crisis discourse.”