From Chuck Thompson’s excellent To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism:
If there’s one lesson I’ve prized from my years of travel it’s this: no place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be. Government bureaucrats are more concerned with covering their asses by issuing ludicrous “warning” than with disseminating accurate situation reports. And our “news media” – if you want to call information largely regurgitated from self-interested corporate and government sources “news” — operates pretty much like your one crazy drunk friend, the guy who has a hysterical public reaction to even the smallest events, and gets in a tizzy over every opinion whether he agrees with it or not.
Truth.