It's wise to be somewhat skeptical, both about fairy tales and about risk narratives

From It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Remake Our Picture of Reality by David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robert Lichter. Their book provides a wealth of case studies documenting the low quality of initially reported information, the longevity of inaccurate information and the myriad bad practices, laziness and ideology which so easily pollute our public discourse. A useful complement to Samuel Arbesman's The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date.

Page 131, discussing the non-existence of stranger abductions, the fear of which so colored the mid-1980s.

In any event, it's useful to be aware of the tendency - common to much of humanity and by no means unique to journalists - to construct a story that fits a predetermined narrative theme about victims and villains. In some cases this narrative may more or less accurately represent reality, just as some individuals' lives are more or less accurately summed up by the fairy-tale formula, "and they lived happily ever after." Still, it's wise to be somewhat skeptical, both about fairy tales and about risk narratives. It's always important to know what we do (and don't) know about the extent of the risk, the cause of the risk, and the ways in which the risk can most prudently and expeditiously be reduced if not eliminated. Good reporting about risk addresses those issues; too often, bad reporting only encourages us to live fearfully ever after.

Amen. Fairy tales provide us both heuristics as well as narrative archetypes which are useful to us as decision-makers when encountering circumstances we have not experienced before. That said, reality should not be shoe-horned into the pre-existing mold. If it fits, great. But if it doesn't, figure out what is really going on, don't just rely on off-the-shelf mental models.