To be sure, in a large, diverse economy like ours, there will always be some people struggling even if the national economy is in great shape—which it is right now. Disparities between national and local economies are also common. Atlanta’s economy can be booming while New York’s is in the doldrums. But personal and geographic idiosyncrasies should wash out when pollsters put together a truly representative national sample. Phrased crudely, the typical American lives and works under typical economic conditions.

But that isn’t what the polls tell you. People have a more positive view of their personal finances, and even of their local economies, than they do of the national economy. Here are a few recent examples.

In a mid-May poll, 41% of respondents told the Pew Research Center that they rate their personal finances as “excellent or in good shape,” but only 23% rated the country’s economic conditions as “excellent or good.”

Results like those that Pew found are close to ubiquitous across polls. Gallup polls in April found that 46% of Americans rated their personal finances excellent or good, but only 24% said national economic conditions were excellent or good.

Interestingly, respondents’ ratings of the economy improve as polling questions get more local. A Wall Street Journal poll of seven swing states in March found that 54% of respondents rated their state’s economy as excellent or good, but only 36% said that about the national economy. Could those state economies really be so different from the national economy?

Some polls show an even more stark contrast between sentiments and reality. A Harris poll conducted a few weeks ago for the Guardian found that 49% of Americans believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, 72% think inflation is increasing, and 56% think the U.S. is in a recession. Not one of these propositions is remotely true. That same poll even found that 49% think the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year. Your brokerage statement will assure you otherwise.

Notice that this batch of questions is about objective facts, not subjective opinions. The apparent errors in perception are large, and they aren’t random. Rather, they all allege that the national economy is doing far worse than it actually is. What’s going on here? Maybe there’s a hint in the finding that the economy gets rated more highly when the pollsters’ questions come closer to home.

Consider this analogy: I live in Princeton, N.J. If you ask me how the weather here has been lately, I can answer accurately. (Hot!) If you ask me about the entire state, my answer will still be reasonably accurate, though I may forget that it’s been cooler at the shore. But if you ask me about the recent weather in Oregon—or even Michigan, which is much closer—I’ll probably draw a blank unless the national news media has prompted me by reporting on some terrible weather event there. Bad news about the weather travels.

A similar phenomenon may be distorting people’s evaluations of the national economy. They know their personal situations from direct experience, and in many cases those recent experiences have been pretty good and are getting better. They also have some direct experience with their local and state economies, many of which are in fine shape. But they never directly experience the national economy. It’s an abstraction. What people believe about the national economy comes from the media. And media reporting skews negative.

With a Democrat in the White House, Republicans tend to have more negative views of the economy than Democrats do, so it’s tempting to blame right-wing media. But the negative bias shows up across media channels with different political leanings. While this negativity isn’t new, it appears to be intensifying. A study of news reports by the Brookings Institution found that “economic news sentiment grew more unmoored from fundamentals and was consistently in a negative direction” after 2016, and especially after 2021.

If negativity bias really is getting worse, that’s a problem. As the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, people are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts.

Mr. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton. He served as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1994-96.