In Triplicate

Yesterday morning, I went out for breakfast. While I was waiting for the food to be brought to the table I checked the Google app on my phone, to see what the latest news was. In the local news section, there were 15 articles in the carousel. Three of them were devoted to covering the same sexual assault story from the next county over.

And people wonder why the public's perception of crime doesn't match the reality.

There is nothing wrong with crime stories. They're news, just like anything else. And media outlets have settled on "if it bleeds, it leads" for a reason. But it is possible to over-cover a story. In the Google instance, that came in the form of presenting three stories from different media organizations about the same event. The inventive to present stories that will draw people in, so that they'll see whatever advertising messages are placed alongside the story, leads to a shift in the proportion of coverage. And those sorts of shifts shape perceptions, because most people don't have much firsthand knowledge of enough of the world around them to have an independent sense of what's happening in the broader world around them. In other words, even if one understands that the headlines may not paint an accurate picture of the real world, it takes a pretty expansive view things beyond the headlines to understand the ways in which the picture is inaccurate.