This tends to happen to an exceptional degree when news has a strong emotional impact, which is of course what sensationalized headlines try to emphasize (whether out of partisanship or because emotionally charged information is more viral).

People's belief systems about the relative threats of terrorism and pedophiles is thus distorted by the media because the amount of time they spend watching terrorist attacks or episodes of "To Catch A Predator" is massively disproportionate to the actual level of risk posed by those kinds of things, and so especially is the emotional impact of that media.