But that isn’t the whole story. This NBER article suggests that the pessimism of major news outlets is a response to reader demand:
Consistent with the existing literature (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010 and Gentzkow, Glaeser and Goldin 2006), our results suggest that U.S. major outlets publish unusually negative COVID-19 stories in response to reader demand and interest.
***
Overall, we are unable to explain the variation in negativity with political affiliation of an outlet’s
audience, or U.S case count changes, but we do find that U.S. readers demand negative stories (as evidenced by article popularity).
So it may be that most Americans are behaving like sheep primarily because they are, in fact, sheep.