The picture is the minority. The march was the majority.

Your feed this weekend showed fire: burning barricades in Paris, a torched town hall in Limoges, a wrecked carabinieri car in Milan^2,3. Those images are real. They are also a biased sample, and the bias runs in a predictable direction.

By the French president’s own count, several hundred thousand people demonstrated on Saturday with legitimate demands¹. The Guardian describes tens of thousands of peaceful marchers in major cities, parents, teachers and grandparents among them, separate from the groups that surprised the police and from the looters who followed². Nearly 2,400 arrests is a large number. Set against several hundred thousand marchers, it is a small share. The camera, though, goes where the fire is.

Psychologists call this the availability heuristic: what comes to mind easily feels common. A burning building is easy to remember; a peaceful march of grandparents is not. The result is that a weekend gets remembered by its worst hour, and a cause gets judged by its worst participants.

The useful habit is the denominator. Lyon’s mayor, Grégory Doucet, asked for a “sense of nuance” and for “avoiding stereotypes”². Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, called the reasons for the protest “understandable” and the violence “not justifiable”³. Both are denominator sentences: they keep the many and the few in separate columns.

Leaders know the bias, and lean on it in both directions. Portugal’s prime minister warned rivals against “importing” climates of instability that, he said, “have no support in Portuguese society”, while hundreds camped in Lisbon’s Rossio Square over rents³. Both can be true at once. The camp is small. The housing numbers behind it are not.