Why is it that Herod's slaughter of the innocent...?

Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth was a very small city with no more than a few thousand people. The total number of infants who would have been murdered under Herod's edict could be pretty low. Josephus, a major historian at the time, says that Herod murdered such a vast number of people, and was so cruel to those he didn't kill that the living considered the dead to be fortunate. Josephus tells us that there were many atrocities that Herod committed that he does not mention in his histories - and it is probable that authorizing the killing of the presumably few male infants in the vicinity of Bethlehem was a minuscule blot of the blackness that was the reign of Herod. Being that the events of the reign of Herod involved practically one atrocity after another that there was hardly a day in his 36-year reign ped when someone wasn't sentenced to death, it just wouldn't be "headline news" anymore!