The problem, as we all should know by now, is the tendency of the various competing media to grab the public's attention by exaggerating the significance and the importance of every news event.
I recently came across a very old article in the Brisbane Courier newspaper in Australia, dated January 10, 1871. Refer attached photo.
In case some of you have trouble reading the script, I've copied it, word for word, as follows.
"Three consecutive years of drought, while they have stimulated the inventive resources of practical agriculturists, have had the natural effect of calling forth a plentiful crop of speculation from weather prophets, and projectors, and half-instructed meteorologists, and all the philosophic tribe of Laputa in general, to whom the periodical press now affords such fatal facilities.
We have often noticed that in the tabular statements of those compilers of weather records who write to the Times, useful and welcome as their communications are, every season is sure to be "extraordinary", almost every month one of the driest or wettest, or windiest, coldest or hottest, ever known.
Much observation, which ought to correct a tendency to exaggerate, seems in some minds to have rather a tendency to increase it."