The news media often makes it difficult to understand what we should really be afraid of. I shared a few years ago how the causes of death seen in the news don’t resemble the true causes of death very much at all.
A recent example of that in the US is airline crashes. After the tragic January crash with an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter, it seemed that small crashes were dominating the news and had a lot of people scared to fly. While that accident was indeed the largest we’d seen in more than 20 years, the total number of accidents wasn’t going up — it’s actually lower than 2024 so far.
In all of 2024, there were 1,657 accidents, including 329 in January – March. So far in 2025, the total for January – March was just 283 accidents (all data from NTSB here). It’s still a lot, but the pace of accidents isn’t newsworthy. With that many accidents, you could easily make it seem like things are out of control, but it’s a matter of perspective.
In his book “You Are Not So Smart“, author David McRaney gives a very similar explanation:
“If you see lots of shark attacks in the news, you think, ‘Gosh, sharks are out of control.’ What you should think is ‘Gosh, the news loves to cover shark attacks.”
There are certainly times when things rise and should be covered, but much of the time it’s just news that sounds hot whether it really is or not.
