John Stossel notes that journalists tend to have hype extreme risks:

personal-injury lawyers get us to hype risks that barely threaten people, like secondhand smoke, or getting cancer from trace amounts of chemicals. Sometimes they even con us into scaring you about risks that don't exist at all, like contracting anti-immune disease from breast implants.

Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming "crisis" and the coming of bird flu.

I haven't read Taleb's Black Swan book, but it seem he's a fan of the enumeration of bizarre scenarios because one may be right. Yet that is exactly what is endemic in journalism, highlighting bizarre hypotheticals because they are merely possible, as opposed to probable. That's what is behind lotto ticket buyers--you could win!

And then there is the issue that according to Wikipedia, a Black Swan theory is about something with a large-impact and hard-to-predict. Clearly real Black swans are hard to predict, but did they have a large impact? Did the existence of Black Swans change anything? I would say no. So real Black Swans are not metaphorical Black Swans. I expect more clarity upon publication of the Black Swan.