This paper investigates the relationship between economic media sentiment and individuals' expetations and perceptions about economic conditions. We test if economic media sentiment Granger-causes individuals' expectations and opinions concerning economic conditions, controlling for macroeconomic variables. We develop a measure of economic media sentiment using a supervised machine learning method on a data set of Swedish economic media during the period 1993-2017. We classify the sentiment of 179,846 media items, stemming from 1,071 unique media outlets, and use the number of news items with positive and negative sentiment to construct a time series index of economic media sentiment. Our results show that this index Granger-causes individuals' perception of macroeconomic conditions. This indicates that the way the economic media selects and frames macroeconomic news matters for individuals' aggregate perception of macroeconomic reality.