The source article elaborates on the reasons that dramatically over-reporting homicide and terrorism is bad for the public. One of those reasons is that it obscures the actual changes in our lives, it hides what’s truly ‘new’. In that sense, they are fully agreeing with you: news is supposed to communicate on what changed, not what stayed the same. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re supposed to report on the uncommon, but rather they should report on the delta, i.e. what’s different from yesterday.
If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.
If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...