I cherry-picked this quote from an interview of Nassim Nicholas Taleb who researches risk related to "black swans" (extreme outlier events) and how humans perceive them:

"We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from watching television is entirely different from the actual risks that we exposed to. If you watch a building burning on television, it’s going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real actuarial value, no matter your intellectual sophistication."

I thought this was appropriate given the media’s participation in creating and building on various Hurricane Katrina problems, its self-congratulatory attitude when "things got done", and its follow-on retractions of some of the stories that made the news.

It seems to me that all good "news" stories (positive or negative) are implicitly "black swans" and therefore should be considered atypical in our evaluation of the events.