An apart from the book: Enlightenment Now from Steven Pinker. “News is about things that happen, no things that don’t happen. And among the things that do happen, the positive and the negative ones unfold on different timelines. If a newspaper came out every once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such an increase in life expectancy. The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because a mental bug 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. Availability heuristic à stocked by the news policy “if it bleeds, it leads” induce a sense of gloom about the state of the world. News gatekeepers prefer negative to positive coverage, holding the events constant that in turn provides an easy formula for pessimism on the editorial page. ...