I have continued to listen to the news and hear the stories of continued doom by the TV media and then look at published statistics in published media, ie WSJ and NYT---and I cannot correlate the two----and now I am not alone:
From today's NYT:
The U.S. media is an outlier
The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. “The most well-read U.S. media are outliers in terms of their negativity,” Molly Cook, a co-author of the study, told me.
About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals.
Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News).
There is much more than that---but you can get the essence of this distortion---and I have to ask---why?
Every morning in the hotel I hear the sad news of how the numbers are rising----and then I look at the daily insert on the front page of the NYT---shown below---and again--wonder why
BTW---there is detail data down to state and county levels to backup this front page summary.