The good news is the bad news is wrong.

GOT THAT tired, run-down feeling? Can't sleep nights for fretting over the economy, the environment, the population explosion, poverty, immigration, crime, women's rights, you name it? Meet the rest of your fellow Americans--collective sufferers, says Ben J. Wattenberg, from the Bad News Blues. Which malady Wattenberg traces to the anopheles mosquitoes of the media, ever abuzz with negative reporting and chilling analysis.

Considered as a literary enterprise, Wattenberg's latest book is overlong, sometimes overfacile, and too heavily larded with statistics, poll results, etc. Considered as a level-headed look at a major social problem--media negativism and the baneful consequences thereof--the book is an event of sorts. Wattenberg, centrist Democrat, congenital optimist, and currently senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spent the wretched Seventies challenging regnant assumptions about the folly/banality/iniquity of American society. Here he goes again.

The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong: a fully explanatory title. The news is wrong; America isn't going to the hot place. On the contrary, income is up and poverty down; the quality of life is better. "Our population is not exploding, and resources are not disappearing. We have not abandoned nature. We are not a bunch of crass slobs with bad taste, or if we are, we like what we like, and it is not harming us." Wattenberg documents these assertions with figures, figures, figures.

However gloomy the subject, though, cheerfulness is always breaking in. Here and there I think Wattenberg overdoes it. Still, you have to remember what he is up against--namely, the media's Bad News Bias. The media, he says, reason thus: 1) Bad news is big news. 2) Good news is no news. 3) Good news is bad news.

The media in general spread bad news, but television spreads it most graphically and zestfully of all. The camera is the culprit--hungry for violence, confrontation, and suffering. The thesis is not precisely garden-fresh, but Wattenberg makes it arresting by demonstrating how vast is the gap between television and reality.

Take unemployment. "The people they show us on television always seem to have been out of work for a year or two. But is unemployment in America long-term? Not typically. The median duration at the depth of the recent recession was 10.1 weeks, about two and a half months. The average duration was 18 weeks, about four months." How come television never told us this?

How come it never told us either that "among married-couple families experiencing unemployment, about 80 per cent had at least one family member working, most of them full time"? Neither did we learn from the network news that "the percentage of people employed was near a historic high." None of this suited the television news people's transparent purpose, which was to scare the bejesus out of the ordinary Reagan voter.

The consequences of this sort of thing? These go beyond influencing particular elections, as happened in 1982. What if, against our better judgment, we swallow the media's formulations about modern society? May not bad, the incorrect, economic news yield genuine bad news? May not perpetual government scandals alienate the governed from the governors? May not the invisibility--to American TV--of Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, together with the high visibility of Western troops in hot-spots like Lebanon, warp public understanding of the stakes in the U.S.-Soviet "rivalry"? Wattenberg, muting for once his optimism, suggests that the answers are yes, yes, and yes--although the viewers aren't completely naive. Witness how "The press is being hassled, and is worrying about the situation."

This is quite true. I can wish only that Wattenberg had dwelled longer on this, his final point--but, by the time he comes to it, it's page 403, about time to quit. The media indeed are in a sweat over public perceptions of their conduct: all the more so since the Time-Sharon decision. Souls are being searched and hard questions asked; not often enough, but more often than seemed likely five or ten years ago. Out of which something good could yet come.

The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong is a much more serious book than Wattenberg's wham-bamzowie writing style might suggest. The problem that Wattenberg addresses is as real as he says it is. An optimistic President has for the moment put the doomsayers in their place, but that in no way solves the fundamental problem they pose. As Jeane Kirkpatrick says in a dust-jacket blurb of singular perceptiveness: "We must learn to bear the truth about our society, no matter how pleasant it may be."