Samuel Beckett was walking with a friend on a sunny English afternoon when his friend exclaimed, "On a day like this it's good to be alive." Beckett replied, "I wouldn't go as far as that." That was a bit of his characteristically mordant humor. However, of late, Americans have been feeling, or at least have been talking as though they feel, uncharacteristically bleak about their prospects. For this, journalism deserves a portion of the blame. The problem is not that journalists consider the phrase "good news" an oxymoron. Rather, the problem has two dimensions, which are somewhat contradictory.

First, journalists, far from being the hard-bitten and world-weary sorts found in The Front Page, may be America's last romantics. They really seem startled, even scandalized by the fact that their society always seems to have serious problems. Journalists feel that someone, or some identifiable faction, must be to blame. And the fault must be a sin of omission, because something can always be done to correct imperfections and right wrongs.

Second, and in contrast, journalists have, by the working of our trickle-down culture, absorbed from the academy a watery postmodernism that makes a dogma of skepticism. It teaches that nothing is what it seems; everything must be "unmasked"; the veil of appearances must be torn aside. That, increasingly, is how journalists understand their vocation. This is particularly the spirit of television journalism which deals with pictures, meaning the surfaces of things.

These two journalistic tendencies partially explain a puzzle: this is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect. Americans are increasingly susceptible to the suspicion that no one is telling the truth Ð or there is no truth to tell. So this is a good time to say: It is good to be alive in America at the end of the first (but not the last) American century.

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