Commentary: Do we make bad assumptions about the news coverage we see?
Recently I was struck by a conversation I had with a progressive friend. When I noted the significant decrease in extreme world poverty over the past two decades — a remarkable achievement that has attracted relatively little news coverage — he responded by confidently denying that this was so. His reasoning was instructive: If this were true, he said, he would have heard about it by now.
Reasoning from an absence of news is a familiar, and often justified, phenomenon. If you are worried that your favorite sports team is thinking
