By Samuel Strait, Report at Large – March 30, 2021 It is often said in this brave new world that we occupy that public perception, media reporting and reality are too often worlds apart. Climate change, wars, poverty, pandemics, corruption, evil, rampant crime, racism, sexism, inequality, overpopulation, and biodiversity collapse are just a few of the things that are screamed from media headlines on a regular basis. Everything is beyond salvation, and humanity is at the end of times. What is the point of looking to the future if this is what is in store? The good news is that things are not always as bad as portrayed in the headlines, nor in much of any of the stories of doom and gloom in your local news source. When a plane goes down and kills many hundreds of people, the knee jerk response by the public is an increase in resorting to car transportation from normal travel on an airline. The media is almost breathless in its coverage of the tragedy, interviews, who's at fault, did the plane itself malfunction, and on and on. The perception being that riding on an airplane is extraordinarily dangerous and aircraft tend to crash frequently and indiscriminately. Public perception is on high alert for more such tragedy. Reality is some what different. According to recent findings, air travel is significantly safer than traveling in the family vehicle. Only one in eleven million passengers might experience death from airplane crashes. One cannot ever compare that to the thousands of deaths from car crashes each year. The media's sole reason for existence is not to portray the mundane of daily life, but to reveal the sensational. Negative news sells even if it might be a rare occurrence. Because most folks get their knowledge of the world through the media, very often this skewed version of world events cause their perceptions to be distorted, disfigured, and wildly inaccurate. Reality come very often in most unexpected ways. In a recent summary of police shootings of black men in America, a Washington Post article claimed that just short of 1,000 black men and women where shot by police officers in 2019. Harvard economists took that article and those that read it and asked those surveyed how many police shootings of unarmed black men in 2019 had occurred. The response was startling. Republicans felt the number was between one hundred and one thousand. Democrats felt the number was between one thousand and ten thousand. Unaffiliated answered fifty to one hundred. The answer to that question as best determined was twenty five. No mention of the actual number was mentioned in the original article. The bottom line is that even the smartest among us are clueless about how the news media environment is distorting our world view. People are not starving at record levels, violent crime in America has declined over the past several years, and police are not normally responsible for systemic racism. Air travel is exceedingly safe, and we will clearly be able to survive climate change. All of the items listed at the beginning of this article as catastrophic seem to have solutions and are gradually receding as a danger to the human population in the future. Media and public perception are not often in line with reality and the public would be well informed to understand that difference.