When I meet my friends and tell them about my last vacation instead of my work, how I slept, and how often I brush my teeth, is that also “manipulation”?
If your friend then believes that work, sleep, and hygiene are not things you did at all because you don't talk about them, then your analogy would be comparable. People believe homicide and terrorism are significantly more common than they are, and vote accordingly. It's affecting all of our lives. Let me know when your vacation stories change public policy, and then I'll start complaining about those.
The difference being that while people have a good intuition on one may spend their vacation and what one would talk about, it’s not so easy to extrapolate for other things.
Sure, everybody knows that media talks more about homicides and terrorism than the thousands of people dying or „old age“-kind of things, but it’s not always easy to keep in mind on how far apart these numbers are.
I think „manipulation“ may be to strong of a word here, since it assumes intent to manipulate, which is not necessarily to focus on „out of the ordinary“ events. But I think nonetheless that this infographic is interesting and important, because it reminds us that these biases exist and how big they are.
