In the broader 'news' context, it's bad, because there are a crapton of things that really aren't as significant as they are made out to be to the layman. It's not a firehose we should be drinking from, instead, the most significant things are supposed to be selected by specialists so we have enough space in our heads to focus on things we choose to instead of just whatever happens to be getting firehosed at us.
(you can probably elaborate the 'selected by specialists' with complete departments or even organisations that specialise in various things - the world is much too big and made of too many pieces for just some person or small team to do all the 'is this thing important' work for everything, and definitely not in a single outlet)
We don’t in fact drink from the firehose. There are actually specialists who select what stories we are exposed to. The simple fact is that their incentives of politics and profits don’t align with yours of general knowledge and a peaceful learned population, and what we see today is the end result of these incentives.
Another example is the stranger kidnapping scare of the ‘80s.
There’s an unhealthy paradox at work: The rarer a highly emotional event occurs, the more media attention attention it gets. The more media attention something gets, the more people think it’s actually common.
Another example is police killing unarmed black men.
Trying explaining to someone that something is in the news because it’s rare is futile.
In the broader 'news' context, it's bad, because there are a crapton of things that really aren't as significant as they are made out to be to the layman. It's not a firehose we should be drinking from, instead, the most significant things are supposed to be selected by specialists so we have enough space in our heads to focus on things we choose to instead of just whatever happens to be getting firehosed at us.
(you can probably elaborate the 'selected by specialists' with complete departments or even organisations that specialise in various things - the world is much too big and made of too many pieces for just some person or small team to do all the 'is this thing important' work for everything, and definitely not in a single outlet)