<p><pre><code> "interestingly, we found that politics influence people’s risk perceptions more than hard data such as crime statistics."
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Oh Glob yes.<p>Modern misperceptions of safety tend to flow from media that fall into 2 camps. 1) Inept parroting of disprovable stats. 2) Campaigns of intentional/delusional, curated lies.<p>The second is inseparable from politics. It's also an arms-race reaction to imagined boogey-men (bias) - where the response was to become one (biased), only much more so.<p>But we didn't get here from zero. Some years ago, the gateway drug for news orgs was...<p><pre><code> ...being irresponsible. Leaning into false danger signalling to juice stats.
Like reporting a distant crime (ex:agenda-driven shooting) in a manner/tone that signaled the crime had instead occurred in their community.
...being incompetent. Like parroting false risks (es:stranger kidnappings of children), even tho authoritative stats the clearly debunk those claims.</code></pre>