But as my mum says when I try to point out she's worrying about the wrong things, "I don't care what the statistics say, I read about it in the paper and I believe it's worse." So is it the papers that are distorting reality or are people wilfully obstinate in their beliefs? (Hint: it's both).

I don't think your mom is irrational given what is covered - but the big mistake we often make is thinking that what we read is representative of what is going on. I want to use data to show this effect on a number of issues.

And the larger point I will make in a future post is that news covers what people want to read, which is problematic if the goal is good decisions.

(As an engineer, I often think about this as akin to sampling bias)

[OP] I spent some time categorizing death coverage in the first pages of The New York TImes compared to actuality over a 20 month period. I’ve been intrigued about why so many make threat assessments based on news coverage, and wanted to see if the “sampling” of news was close to representative.