I'll probably get fired for this if someone finds it but I'll say it anyway. Nowadays take what you hear in the news with a grain of salt.
Do your own research because TV stations aren't. Local stations have been bought by big companies and have been scaled down so much to try and make as much profit for the company that journalism in itself is going down the drain fast. How do I know this? I'm a journalist and have been for almost a decade. I've seen the rapid decline since I've started.
The networks are also scaling back except for a few, and they need ratings so bad, that they will way overhype things to get higher ratings. The problem then is, on the local level, we take the feeds from these big networks as-is and run the story without doing research and looking to balance out the story. Journalists just aren't given the time to really look into things like they used to. There is a lot more pressure from producers that need to fill their ever expanding newscasts to turn as many stories a day as possible.
I like to use Uber as an example because it was making a lot of headlines. Since Uber was very new and different people were paying attention to it. And of course taxi companies are not happy with it because they have to now compete with something. So what do they do, they go to city council and invite the media to televise them slandering Uber and talking about how it's a public safety issue, we'll all the local stations are there and every station wants to be first to air with it and with no time to research anything they just go with it. Now we like to skirt around facts by saying XYZ Taxi SAYS that Uber is a huge threat to public safety.
Now if we actually took the time to dig things up and research the topic, out of the millions of rides given each day through Uber, the chances of becoming a victim of a crime in an Uber is substantially less than becoming a victim of a crime in a taxi, and even if a reporter had the time to find this info producers feel that nobody cares about taxis because they've been around forever, so that news won't generate ratings, so producers don't like it, so it will never see the light of day. But every single time there is an incident with Uber you can bet you'll see it on the news.
Sorry for the ridiculous rant I just went on, but when I see people start saying well there are tons of horror stories about it, I just get infuriated by it. It's not their fault, it's the media's. How many times has someone died using AirBNB? How many times has someone died while staying in an actual hotel? Use your brains and as much as I hate to say it, don't rely on the media for credible information anymore.
