eternaldarkness:
Someone who frequently protects you from threats about which you know nothing...
That's the problem right there. As far as you know,
I've protected you from a threat about which you know nothing. Unless I spell out the threat for you, however, and tell you about what I did, it's not going to matter to you. And even if I do spell out my "Men in Black" activities, you might not believe me without corroborating evidence, like other people that live near you that you already trust who tell you the same thing.
Anyway, in default D&D, normal people are going to be exceptional if they've ever gone 20 miles from their home. Sure, those who were part of an army may have gone much, much, much farther than that. In Australia and the United States, you had cattle drives that went for about 3,000 and 1,000 miles (respectively), but cowboys that went on drives like that were an incredibly small part of the population, percentage-wise. People might up and move to a sparsely settled area in an attempt to make a better life for themselves, but once there they aren't going to move around very much. Even in Eberron, basically the only way to really go long distance is by a costly airship ride. People didn't really start traveling "long" distances just for fun or on a regular basis until railroads and cars were invented.
Newspapers were started just after the invention of the printing press, but most D&D campaigns don't have that device, and even for settings that do (Eberron), without easy long distance communication like telegram lines or something, the newspapers are going to be mostly all about piddely local stuff. Take a look at any small town newspaper today and you'll see the same thing.
So, if there's an evil necromancer 30 miles away who mostly keeps to himself in his tower of power, it might not have really affected your life, it might be as remote as violence going on in Rwanda, a place where probably nobody that you know of has visited. Did anyone here pay attention to the Rwandan intelligence officer who was recently sentenced in France to 25 years in prison on genocide charges? Yeah, me neither. Most of us have heard about things happening in Rwanda, we know rumors about the genocide, but it's just not making our local newspapers and most of us know about as much about Rwanda as your average D&D townsperson knows about the evil necromancer in his tower 30 miles away.