Someone may be murdered on the street you ride your bike to work each morning. And, unless you live in Compton its unlikely to ever happen again. And if you do live in Compton why the hell are you riding your bike to work through a war zone you moron?! :)
But lets just say these things do in fact happen. Likely, you're not going to hear about them from the news. You're going to hear about them from a friend, family member, and/or co-worker long before seeing it on the news.
The point of this article isn't that the news is bad because its news. Its that news is bad because all the media outlets focus on the wrong things (rapes, murders, etc...). Things you actually don't need the news for in order to stay informed.
Where the news can be great is keeping a populace informed of their government. Nixon was taken down by news done well. Unfortunately, in the day of Fox News, being an informed populace is even becoming difficult.
Equality doesn't just mean that everybody has the same wealth, regardless of how hard they work. This is superficial. It means everyone has to think the same way. That's the only way we'll ever get true equality, and we won't get that until everyone's getting the same information. Conformity, equality, obedience: these must be our core values. Fox News must be stopped.
What is more likely, as the article points out, is that I'll read a lot of reports that distorts the actual risks of various types of events, and change my behaviour in ways that negatively affect me.
When reporting disaster rate of incidents per 100,000 and a break down of the root causes as a percentage isn't as sexy as showing wreckage or other dramatic video.