The belief
The news can tell you that a thing happened. It cannot tell you how much of that thing there is in the world. When we hand it the job of telling us how much, how wide, how often, we end up letting the news decide how scared we are and how safe we feel.
Where it comes from
I noticed it while writing about violence and the feeds that amplify it. A story is true, it reaches me, and suddenly my picture of the whole world has moved, even though nothing about the world’s size changed. Each of us only gets to look through a small keyhole.
How it shows up for me
It became a rule that actually works to keep me kind and honest, especially with strangers, and especially against my own biases. When a headline makes me afraid of a group of people, I ask: does this tell me that, or does it tell me how much? It almost always only tells me that.
I still get pulled in. A bad week of headlines can change how I look at people in a parking lot before I catch it.