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.

In Citizen Kane, Kane tells Mr Carter: ‘If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.’ The obverse is that: ‘If the headline is small enough, it makes the news disappear.’ Or to paraphrase Daniel Kahneman: ‘Many things in life are not nearly as unimportant as we think they are while we are not thinking about them.’ Rising house prices have been a problem in the making for two decades, but until this year the issue received no media attention. Why not?

This all matters a lot. If Watergate had been relegated to the inside pages, Nixon would have served a full term. Without the Downing Street parties becoming a media circus, Boris would still be in No. 10. But surely these were huge stories? Actually, it still comes down to subjective opinion. When the Washington Post first offered to syndicate its Watergate investigation to the LA Times, it was told: ‘People on the West Coast really aren’t interested in this kind of thing.’

Journalists are fond of saying that, ‘There are two sides to every story.’ In fact there are at least three. Along with both sides of the story, there is also the possibility that it isn’t really a story at all, or is a distraction from something else. I was reminded of this watching Sky News recently when, at a time of war in Ukraine and Palestine, the lead story constituted 30 minutes spent discussing the fact that a member of the royal household seemed not to be all that adept at using Photoshop, all the while scrutinising an innocent photograph as though it were the Zapruder footage. Why can’t I complain to Ofcom about that? ‘Look, either tell us some facts or shut the hell up.’ This is not news – it is simply synthesised aspersion.

Indeed, when Donald Trump rails about ‘fake news’ and insults journalists in interviews, I suspect this resonates with voters much more than most journalists actually realise. More people need to do this. Perhaps that’s because, to misquote Kahneman again: ‘To most people, journalists aren’t nearly as important as journalists think they are.’