Its the same thing for your car; any news is bad news, because your car operating as normal is not news, and anything that happens will move your car away from that optimal spot - it's bad news.

OK, I get that that is indeed what makes these headlines tick, but if we take a step back. That is a ridiculous way of looking at the economy.

* historically speaking, there is no stability to be found

* I don't see how the poor in the world would support this view that "stability is good"

* in fact, I'm sure economists would raise alarms if we would have zero growth for a long time.

Specifically, the propaganda model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

> First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views corporate media as businesses interested in the sale of a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers) rather than the pursuit of quality journalism in service of the public. Describing the media's "societal purpose", Chomsky writes, "... the study of institutions and how they function must be scrupulously ignored, apart from fringe elements or a relatively obscure scholarly literature". The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five classes are: ownership of the medium, the medium's funding sources, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism or "fear ideology".