That the media uses statistics to create a false sense of danger and causes many people significant anxiety isn't "breaking" news. However this is a nice breakdown of it curtesy of Dave Hitz:
You live in a small village on Shark Island. Your village has about 100 people, and the island, a remote paradise in the South Pacific, has a total of ten villages, all the same size. The island's name has always seemed a bit odd to you, because you've never seen a shark. In fact, nobody in your village has ever seen a shark, and even in the stories of your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, nobody ever saw a shark. There is one story, though, from another village, far on the other side of the island, and a hundred years ago, about a shark that ate a swimmer.
So here's the question. It's a hot, humid day, and a dip in the cool ocean water sure would be refreshing. Do you take a swim, or does that shark attack in a far away village in a far away time scare you off?
I've asked many people, and almost always they say, "That doesn't sound dangerous. I think I'll take a swim."
Here's how Shark Island plays out with modern mass media. Shark Island had a thousand people, and one person died in a hundred years. That's a death rate of one per hundred-thousand. Greater Los Angeles has a population of about 13 million, so the equivalent death rate there would be 130 people per year. Based on the media excitement that one shark attack generates, I'm sure that 130 deaths in one city would have people fleeing the beaches in droves, all across America.
The problem is, our brains are wired for an environment more like Shark Island than like Los Angeles - small groups of small villages—so media reports spanning millions of people baffle our risk intuition. The exact same death rate that seemed safe in our evolutionary environment causes mass hysteria in our modern environment. No wonder watching television news causes fear in children. What's worse, there are problems much riskier than sharks that don't make the headlines because they aren't "newsworthy". (Auto accidents kill 40,000 people per year. Sharks get better ratings.)