Part if the problem is businesses wanted more tabloid journalism because they wanted to make money. The real journalists fought it but apparently lost, or gave up, or did something else. Now that all news is essentially tabloid, they're not distinct enough to not be aggregated.
I mean with Trump, it's even happening to the papers that have good journalism. They've all turned to Chicken Little and the sky is falling. I mean I can go anywhere to read about the part where Trump said something stupid. I want them to analyze everything he said.
The newspapers were one of the latter industries affected by globalization and disruption. Had they been one of the first, and complained when globalization and automation was in it's infancy, a lot of people wouldn't have embraced it so and the wealth gap would be a lot smaller. Who knows?
Well, judging from sales volumes of self-help books, storage space in bookstores (when those were a thing), success of such shows, motivational speakers, the whole alternative lifestyle industries, and even all the sects and BS "religions" and evangelists to "change life", etc, yeah, the whole nation is "obsession over it", much more than any other place on earth.
One of the things worth remembering sometimes is that technically, what you're seeing is the media culture of a country, not necessarily a country's culture, in articles like this. They are certainly not unrelated to each other, but they are not the same, either.
I've often thought, for instance, that part (not all, but part) of the reason so many of our journalists are down on capitalism is not just political belief, but the specific fact that they are in an industry being actively disrupted by it. Of course they're a bit dour about economic issues, they're not exactly looking ahead to great prospects. I expect there's an ongoing selection process where anybody who has any reasonable chance of getting out mostly already has, so a lot of who is left is precisely the ones who are trapped there.
Are Americans actually obsessed with seeking happiness all the time, or is just our happiness-starved writers? I mean, it's not a topic I hear come up in my casual conversations very often. I know self-help books sell, but there's also a bit of difference between buying one on a whim and scanning it, and obsessing over it.