Maybe the world has always been somewhat mad, but with the advance of technology the pace of the mad has gone crazy. Besides, "bad news sells," or as they say in the newspaper industry: "if it bleeds, it leads."
Bad news, however, can also be a tool. I am not a conspiracy theorist or tinfoil hatter, but there's a definite purpose to serving us a steady diet of violence and disaster-- it keeps people in fear. And people in fear are manipulable. And they do "reactive" things, rather than think things through. If we live in a "post scarcity" world, there's no more need to be afraid, and they we become less controllable.
Aside from my strange sense of "social justice," I was mostly the weird kid in the corner who kept to himself, as far as it was possible. In one sense, it was a blessing to be almost 6'2" by age 12-13-- it made me "scary." On the other hand, the knuckle draggers (who measured everything in terms of brute strength) saw it as an opportunity to pick a fight for "territorial" reasons.