Welcome to most modern journalism! Remember when every news org started spending time going to Twitter to get the general population’s reactions (instead of actually interviewing real people and figuring out how actually widespread a viewpoint is)? It’s been downhill from there.
Combined with most people only reading headlines, news organizations almost never providing context for most actual facts, and wealth concentration like we’ve never seen, the current state of news media is pretty dire.
You can get people to assume almost any cynical worldview you want when you can chip away at their belief in humanity by repeatedly showing only the worst examples of it. This is what conservative news media has been so good at - getting them to believe a specific image of “liberal” and allowing that image to represent ALL liberals instead of just the most extreme side. Honestly, it feels like most people on the left are similarly starting to use dehumanizing language to describe conservatives. All this leads to people avoiding communication because they assume that everyone on “the other side” believes insane nonsense. Sometimes they do. A lot of times, they don’t.
Source?
I’m pushing back on this viewpoint wherever I’m seeing it. Humans are certainly flawed in a lot of ways, especially in how easy it can be to mislead us, but this cynical worldview that most people are actively wanting others to hurt is not based in reality. Honestly it sounds like me when I was in the depths of depression.
I think we have a major problem with how we share and consume news. Stories are shared as screen-capped headlines that emphasize the Bad thing that happened, and even if you find the original article, it’s stuffed with ads that make you not want to bother. Random one-off bad/stupid things that one person did somewhere far away are reported as world news without statistics and context.
The result? Increasing cynicism. The good, uplifting stories rarely come through. People begin to base their worldview and how they interact with other people on this “fact” that most people suck. This culminates in them becoming the thing that they think everyone is - they go through life scared of or angry at other people by default.
It isn’t an inevitability. Maybe I’m wrong, but believing in people is a much better existence, even when they occasionally let me down.