For those saying that news is news because it's uncommon, that's kinda true, but the issue is that the availability heuristic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic - means that lots of people take the frequency of a cause on the news and think it roughly applies to the frequency of it in the real world. This forces politicians to treat those uncommon causes as much more common than they are - see the difference in terrorism percentages in the image - and skews the kinds of action they take. If you want politicians to actually have a positive impact on people's lives they should be spending a hell of a lot more attention on heart disease and cancer than terrorism. And the media should be covering breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer treatment much more too. The bias towards negative stories really doesn't help, although that's a bit of a tangent.
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For those saying that news is news because it's uncommon, that's kinda true, but the issue is that the availability heuristic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic - means that lots of people take the frequency of a cause on the news and think it roughly applies to the frequency of it in the real world. This forces politicians to treat those uncommon causes as much more common than they are - see the difference in terrorism percentages in the image - and skews the kinds of action they take. If you want politicians to actually have a positive impact on people's lives they should be spending a hell of a lot more attention on heart disease and cancer than terrorism. And the media should be covering breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer treatment much more too. The bias towards negative stories really doesn't help, although that's a bit of a tangent.