People rank tornadoes (which kill about 50 Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than 4,000 Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television. Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. Plane crashes always make the news, but car crashes, which kill far more people, almost never do. But whenever a memory turns up high in the result list of the mind’s search engine for reasons other than frequency-because it is recent, vivid, gory, distinctive, or upsetting-people will overestimate how likely it is in the world.
In many walks of life this is a serviceable rule of thumb.
The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every 50 years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It focuses on discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition (in earlier times, the day before now, seconds before).īad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.Īnd among the things that do happen, the positive and negative ones unfold on different timelines. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”- or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.
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