There are three sides to every story

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died last month aged 90, was perhaps most famous for his dictum that: ‘Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.’ This is often known as the focusing illusion.

The theory explains, say, why a recent Lottery winner with bad toothache may, in the moment, be little happier than a skint person with bad toothache, since in both cases their attention is focused on the pain, not their financial situation.

When Trump rails about ‘fake news’, I suspect this resonates with voters much more than journalists actually realise

It is an important bias to understand, not least because it gives us a vital and often overlooked insight into media bias. We assume media bias arises when people presenting the news express partisan opinions – which is why Ofcom is notified whenever someone on GB News says anything anyone finds discomforting. Yet most media bias does not take this form: it arises instead from the relative prominence news media attach to different stories.

As an example of this, bar Computer Weekly and Private Eye, virtually no British publication paid any attention to the Post Office scandal for a decade until ITV made a drama about it. Admittedly it did not help that it was universally referred to as an ‘accounting scandal’. This was a terrible name. On its own, the very word ‘accountancy’ drains any surrounding sentence of any possible interest. I suspect that if you posted some footage on PornHub and titled it ‘accountancy orgy’ or even ‘barely qualified auditors discover the joys of double-entry’ you probably wouldn’t get many views. The scandal surely deserved a better name, but it also warranted far more prominence – yet it was relegated to the inside pages if it featured at all.