"It's how I stay safe"

Part of the pull of the news is protective. The world has dangers in it, and keeping an eye on them feels like basic prudence. If you know about the stabbing, the scam, the outbreak and the storm, you can take care.

For a small class of news this is true, and I'll set it aside now. A weather warning for your area, a road closure on your route, a product recall for something in your cupboard, or a public health notice that applies to you are all information with an action attached. You should have them, and chapter 15 makes room for them. They make up a very small share of what you see in a day.

For the rest, consider how a story gets into the news. It gets in by being unusual. A stabbing outside a nightclub two hundred miles away is reported because such things are rare enough to be notable. The events that are most likely to harm you are common, and common things aren't news. The leading causes of death and injury for someone like you are heart disease, cancer, falls and road accidents close to home. None of those will be in tomorrow's headlines, because they happen every day.

So the news is a systematically poor guide to your own risks. It shows you a great many vivid examples of rare dangers and almost none of the common ones, and your mind does what minds do with vivid examples. It treats them as frequent.

There's clear evidence of this from England and Wales. The Crime Survey, which asks tens of thousands of people each year about their actual experience of crime, shows that crime measured that way fell substantially from a peak in 1995. Throughout that fall, the same survey asked people whether they thought crime in the country as a whole was going up or down. Year after year, most people said it was going up. The Office for National Statistics, which runs the survey, puts it bluntly. People's perceptions of crime at a national level don't typically match reality.

The same report contains a second finding that I think is even more telling. When people were asked about crime in their own local area, their answers matched reality much better. People in high-crime areas knew it, and people in low-crime areas knew that too. The statisticians' explanation is that people have direct knowledge of what happens locally.

Put those two findings together. Where people rely on their own eyes, they judge the risks well. For the country as a whole they have to rely on the news, and there they were wrong for twenty years, always in the direction of more fear. The more of that kind of reporting a person takes in, the more confidently mistaken they're likely to be.

This matters for how you live. Someone who believes the country is getting steadily more dangerous makes different choices. They go out less in the evening, trust strangers less, let their children do less, and feel a background dread that has no counterpart in their own street. They're paying these costs for the sake of safety, and they're no safer for it.

If safety is what you're after, I'd suggest you get more of it from the dull sources. Your GP can tell you about your real risks. The Met Office can tell you about the weather, and the council about the road. If you want to know how the country is doing on crime, health or the economy, the annual statistics will tell you far more than a year of headlines, and you can read them in twenty minutes.