12 ms·

How people die vs. media coverage of death

221 points by rkaplan 8y ago

acidburnNSA 8y ago
Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.
- otakucode 8y ago
  It wouldn't make much sense for the news to report on things which were not newsworthy. That people die from very typical things people always die from just isn't news.
  - troels 8y ago
    But people have always died from violence. It's hardly news.
    - pdpi 8y ago
      Fewer people die to violence now than they ever did. That’s what makes it news.
  - BoiledCabbage 8y ago
    So by the argument, the more terrorism kills, the less it should be reported? I think it's clear it's not due to its infrequency that it's reported on so much.
    - fyi1183 8y ago
      Are you sure about that? I haven't actually lived through the Troubles in England, but my understanding is that while terrorist acts were obviously reported by the news, there was much less hysteria than for today's much rarer terrorist events.
- lifeformed 8y ago
  I think the fears of terrorism is less about how many people it kills, as how unsafe it makes people feel.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    And how useful that feeling is to manipulate for media companies.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    It’s right there in the name.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    i am one of those people who think that we should allocate resources against causes of death in close proportion to the number of lives claimed. my guess is that many other engineering types also take this position. recently however, i have come to worry that this position lacks empathy. especially in light of recent mass shootings in the US, i am forced to consider that some types of deaths have far worse second order effects than others. if ten people die on different days out in the woods, ten sets of family and friends are devastated. tragic, but if ten students are killed at school in the same day, it seems that the lasting damage is far more severe and widespread. to some extent you can say that's just because people are emotional/irrational and they are blocking optimal allocation, but maybe the optimal solution does need to take into account how people feel about things. maybe things like terrorism and mass shootings are actually a lot more harmful than the numbers suggest.
    - gnode 8y ago
      The issue is more that due to highly asymmetric reporting, people wrongly estimate what the risks to themselves and loved ones are. This means that we don't act rationally in our own interests, to best avoid harm. I think most parents would care more about road safety, carbon monoxide poisoning, mental health, etc. than about terrorism or school shootings, if they were aware of the statistics.
  - mulmen 8y ago
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. How many people do you know that were killed or injured in a terrorist attack? Second order? Same question for {murdered, illness, natural cause}. Compare magnitudes.
  - 13of40 8y ago
    I knew a person whose brother in law was killed in 9/11 and another guy whose best friend was shot down in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Trouble is I really can't compare it to the scads of relatives of friends who have undoubtably died of cancer or heart disease, because those just aren't the kind of stories people swap on a fishing trip.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife What leads you to believe that was ever a major cause of death for more than a tiny handful of people? It would seem the hardships of living before modern medicine and (any) agriculture would have killed far more people. Given how expensive/risky it was to collect food, why would any group of folks risk most of their healthy, strong brood to wage regional conflict? If they lost, all of them would lose by virtue of losing the most capable members of the society.
owenshen24 8y ago
Hey everyone, I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction! I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process. ^_^
- mars4rp 8y ago
  The coloring of the chart is awful, alzheimer and terrorism having almost identical color.
  - soSadSoSorry 8y ago
    Oh you!
  - troels 8y ago
    I have to concur. I was confused for a moment about the staggering number of deaths caused by terrorism, until I realised what was going on.
  - owenshen24 8y ago
    That's an easily remediable fix!
- darkerside 8y ago
  I think the concept here is fascinating. One thing I didn't see addressed was that it's not totally unexpected for rare causes of death to be overrepresented in the news (apocryphally, it's been said that "dog bites man" is not news--"man bites dog" is). That said, it seems like the modern short news cycle has edged out attention being paid to long term trends (kidney disease mortality prevalence was surprising to me as well).
- owenversteeg 8y ago
  Hello, Owen, from another Owen! I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it! One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all? Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?
qznc 8y ago
They use media coverage and conflate it with "general public sentiment" and how "people think we die". While the wording seems to be carefully crafted that it avoids stating something outright wrong, it does suggest that they are the same. Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?
- owenshen24 8y ago
  There are! The most famous one is this one https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/22549/Slovic_089.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794... and the results are largely in-line w/ what one might expect. > Two kinds of bias were identified: (a) a tendency to overestimate small frequencies and underestimate larger ones, and (b) a tendency to exaggerate the frequency of some specific causes and to underestimate the frequency of others, at any given level of objective frequency
  - lqdc13 8y ago
    Problem with such use of statistics is that we underestimate black swan events. Humans are intuitively better at it. For example, it would be impossible to predict something like 911 event with such frequentist analysis. Also impossible to predict some sort of nuclear disaster terrorist act that never happened before and could take a million lives. Another thing to keep in mind is the "missing life" (dying young) and quality of life after disease. That's why something like Alzheimer's seems a lot worse than heart disease.
    - im3w1l 8y ago
      Yeah "dying of war" is much more likely than you would think by looking at what Americans died of last 10 years. The same could go for anything that happens rarely but kills a lot of people when it does. 911 was probably too few deaths to make an impact in the statistics though. You'd need something killing tens of millions of people
osteele 8y ago
Cf. xkcd #1468 How worried you should be when various things happen to you in movies vs. real life. https://www.xkcd.com/1468/ https://www.xkcd.com/1468/
- tejohnso 8y ago
  Seems like there's a joke about movies portraying chest wounds on one's left side being much more serious than on the right side. But I don't get it.
  - garblegarble 8y ago
    >Seems like there's a joke about movies portraying chest wounds on one's left side being much more serious than on the right side I'm guessing it's because your heart is on the left (unless you have situs inversus), so he's arguing movies treat a chest wound on the left as hitting the heart
    - baking 8y ago
      It's a movie cliche. Shot on the left side, you are a gonner. Shot on the right, you'll be just fine. So you don't have to worry about whether your favorite character is going to make it to the end of the movie or not.
pmoriarty 8y ago
There's a fascinating documentary called "A Certain Kind of Death",[1] which shows what happens in the US when someone dies with no next of kin. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErooOhzE268 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErooOhzE268
partycoder 8y ago
According to the charts, most people die of cardiovascular disease and cancer. First, most people think their habits and diet are not leading them to a cardiovascular disease. Then, those conditions that primarily afflict a specific demographic. So it might not be as relevant to someone who is let's say, less than 40 years old.
- perilunar 8y ago
  Which is a good thing, because it means most people are dying of old age. You can't officially die of "old age" so if you avoid or survive everything else, eventually you are going die from cancer or heart disease. Problem is though, if you improve cancer treatment then more people will die of heart disease, and vice versa. We really need a category for "died peacefully of advanced age", where we can try hard to increase the death rate.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dbatten 8y ago
So, the media reports on rare, interesting things, not mundane everyday things? I'm shocked!
- losteric 8y ago
  The news is supposed to keep the public informed... fusing of entertainment and information, along with corporate mergers, has brought us to this unhealthy state of public awareness. Our society is becoming more paranoid because it boosts ratings and profit. A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    Fear of terrorism isn’t just fear of dying from terrorism. What was the economic damage or 9/11?
    - mLuby 8y ago
      Pretty sure the actual economic damage ($250B) from 9/11 attacks was small compared to the self-inflicted economic damage that followed in the form of market reactions $1T and wars $2T. In other words, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
      - GW150914 8y ago
        Factor in the two wars and you’re talking a further 6+ trillion. Call it self inflicted or not, it seems disingenuous to act like it all wasn’t a direct and predictable result of the attacks. I’m not discussing blame after all, but consequences and what poeple reasonably fear.
  - rs999gti 8y ago
    > A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year. The same thing could be said for the gun control narrative being pushed by the media and politicians. If gun deaths are classified as homicides and using CDC numbers, they account for less than 1% of deaths. However, looking at the same data on the site for the Guardian and NYT, it looks like the wild west out there and homicides are the leading cause of death next to cancer.
robryan 8y ago
The mainstream commercial news in Australia seems to cover every unusual death that has occurred in the past day. I guess those kind of stories rate well.
jchw 8y ago
Many people are pointing out that it's pretty obvious the news reports more on rarer events. True, but also people don't necessarily realize this when watching the news. I can anecdotally guarantee some of my family members fully believe that homicides are responsible for significantly more deaths than cancer.
DrScump 8y ago
This week's episode of Science Goes to the Movies[0] was a repeat from last summer on Emergency Medicine as portrayed in film/TV vs reality: [0] http://www.cuny.tv/show/sciencegoestothemovies/PR2006291 http://www.cuny.tv/show/sciencegoestothemovies/PR2006291
baking 8y ago
100% of people die from being born. If this data is not segregated by age, it is pretty much meaningless. People don't die of "natural causes" or "old age" any more because the doctors are required to list something previously diagnosed on the death certificate (or else the doctor is looking at a lawsuit.) And the family member who happens to be there at the time of death is in no mood to put up an argument. No one wants to do an autopsy and invasive tests for a frail failing elderly patient are even worse.
- fastball 8y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make. Are you saying that dying of heart disease and cancer are over-diagnosed? Why does that matter in the context of this analysis? It's a comparison between CDC data and news coverage -- any "over-diagnosis" (or under-diagnosis) should be reflected in all datasets equally, so it doesn't really effect the overall review.
  - baking 8y ago
    Everyone dies. The only significance of death is if it occurs sooner than otherwise expected. For the vast majority of people that die in old age what to list on the death certificate can be a conundrum, but it is safe to say no one will ever be sued for malpractice if heart disease is listed as the cause of death. 80% of all deaths due to heart disease occur in the 65 and older population. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2015-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea... EDIT: Take the data from the above table multiply the deaths by the number of "years of life lost" (65 minus the mid-range age for each column) and ignoring the 65 and older age group and I think you might see a better correlation with news coverage.
    - proxygeek 8y ago
      This is actually a very good point. I was thinking myself something along similar lines that intuitively speaking, death by unnatural causes like terrorism/homicide/suicide are of course more "newsworthy" than the ones due to "heart-disease". Although the study is trying to do a larger scale comparison between the perceived and actul leading causes of deaths, it would serve it much better if it were to segment the results by age group.
raarts 8y ago
Would be interesting to see this data for other countries, and comparing for example the overrepresentation factors for violence and terrorism.
nemild 8y ago
This is awesome! You might really like All the News That's Fit to Sell which is a deep dive into the media economics behind why things are covered — it gives lots of color for why coverage is the way it is (there's a famous journalism saying: "If it bleeds, it leads" — which speaks to the readership/profits that come from covering vivid deaths) If useful, I did a similar analysis, but just for the NY Times vs WHO/CDC (I manually tagged an year of articles by cause of death vs. this article's ability to see across many years): In 2015-6, the deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html You can also extend the analysis to see how death coverage varies by region (those who are culturally similar to us get more coverage): How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
- owenshen24 8y ago
  This is super great! Thanks for sharing!
caseymarquis 8y ago
Huh. Something like 1 in 20 people will likely have their lives end in a car accident.
- gkfasdfasdf 8y ago
  It's more like 1 in 100 (in America): http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...
- baking 8y ago
  I think the data is for "unintentional injury" (or death from injury excluding homicide or suicide.) This category is actually the number one cause of death for ages 1-44. The numbers are fairly constant from ages 15 to 64 but the rate jumps up by a factor of 2.5 after age 65. Assuming that retirees are not just taking up sky diving, this is probably due to increased frailty and hospitalizations caused by falls. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2015-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea... EDIT: It seems that in addition to car accidents, poisoning, overdoses, and falls, make up the vast majority of this category.
frostycakepie 8y ago
Our brains look for/create drama + drama gets views. To the first point, I’m reading the book Factfulness, and it covers this stuff pretty eye openingly we’ll.
arca_vorago 8y ago
I'd love to see room for competition in media that took a different path if it wasn't already all monopolies and bribes cough lobbying and the innefectuality of the FCC in it's mandate. A strong fourth estate is essential to the proper functioning of the constitutional democractic republic.
CalRobert 8y ago
Thanks!! It's kind of amazing how skewed our view of reality is. Saying "I don't care about terrorism" gets you dirty looks but is a reasonable approach to life if you live in wealthy country and are are trying to worry about things most likely to affect you. I care about gun violence and knew it was overreported, but it blew my mind to find out that there are about twice as many deaths per year from just asbestos are there are gun homicides. I wonder how many other misconceptions there are? (Total gun deaths is much higher due to suicide and accidents)
- hansthehorse 8y ago
  When presented with gun violence statistics ask them to take out gang related and suicide then you can more accurately use the information.
  - CalRobert 8y ago
    Well, those statistics aren't wrong, they just tell a different story. Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. Gang-related violence... I'm not sure why I'd exclude that? They're human beings. The term also is very unevenly applied and laws meant to target "gang-related violence" have a tendency to burden minorities more heavily. (See also: "terrorism") https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/how-do-you-define-a-gang-member.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/how-do-you-defin...
    - DanBC 8y ago
      > Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. The main prevention measure for both murder and suicide is to reduce access to methods. It's fine for a nation to say they make the choice not to restrict access to guns, but they need to be honest about the increased numbers of people dying this will cause.
      - LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
        Reduce access to the methods to end ones life? Is this irony?
ObeyTheGuts 8y ago
this nonsense, as you need check YOUNG PEOPLE deaths, ye old die from disease, but that is general accepted path, what perfect news would blast is causes that kill people in their prime
emj 8y ago
It's actually worse, because you have to factor in media attention, advertisement, bias etc to things that makes the problem worse; e.g. most of those hearts and respitory deaths can be attributed to pollution and lack of exercise, that means the car and all that it brings. You are inundated with positive coverage of cars all over, they are vehemently supported in most pieces and comments. Pair that with; Heart Disease 10.388 Under Car Accidents 2.285 Under Lower Respiratory Disease 3.520 Under
lalp1 8y ago
Another good example that "data" is not always meaningful. The graphs help the idea "media are talking too much about terrorism". All deaths are not equal. Most of old people die naturally from an heart failure or cancer, that the natural process of death. Homicides and accidents are not natural but common. Terrorism is an exception, that's why it so much covered. 100 old people dying from cancer do not worth 1 minute of press coverage, a family killed by a truck in a christmas market a bit more.
- ArchTypical 8y ago
  It's not even so much about the rarity of events, but the violation of Informed Consent. The fundamental assumption in modern society is that you know there are dangers and their relative frequency, so that you may make decisions based on that for you to reach a mental equilibrium of risk vs reward. Someone/something acting psuedo-randomly to violate that equilibrium to an extreme (where there are brutally less choices available due to paralysis or fatal event for an individual or group) is what people react to. They want to incorporate these semi-random events into their daily equilibrium in the form of perceived patterns. This eventually leads to more extreme views (some form of theoretical pattern that fits), in lieu of data.
coldtea 8y ago
>"Although all diseases claim almost 1,OOO times as many lives as do homicides, there were about three times as many articles about homicides than about all diseases. Furthermore, homicide articles tended to be more than twice as long as articles reporting deaths from diseases and accidents." Doesn't that make sense? If diseases kill 1000x more people, they are not news -- they're same old, what has been going on since forever. Now, if there a novel disease or epidemic, sure, that would get coverage.

221 points by rkaplan 8y ago

Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.

otakucode 8y ago
It wouldn't make much sense for the news to report on things which were not newsworthy. That people die from very typical things people always die from just isn't news.
- troels 8y ago
  But people have always died from violence. It's hardly news.
  - pdpi 8y ago
    Fewer people die to violence now than they ever did. That’s what makes it news.
- BoiledCabbage 8y ago
  So by the argument, the more terrorism kills, the less it should be reported? I think it's clear it's not due to its infrequency that it's reported on so much.
  - fyi1183 8y ago
    Are you sure about that? I haven't actually lived through the Troubles in England, but my understanding is that while terrorist acts were obviously reported by the news, there was much less hysteria than for today's much rarer terrorist events.
lifeformed 8y ago
I think the fears of terrorism is less about how many people it kills, as how unsafe it makes people feel.
- r00fus 8y ago
  And how useful that feeling is to manipulate for media companies.
- mikeash 8y ago
  It’s right there in the name.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  i am one of those people who think that we should allocate resources against causes of death in close proportion to the number of lives claimed. my guess is that many other engineering types also take this position. recently however, i have come to worry that this position lacks empathy. especially in light of recent mass shootings in the US, i am forced to consider that some types of deaths have far worse second order effects than others. if ten people die on different days out in the woods, ten sets of family and friends are devastated. tragic, but if ten students are killed at school in the same day, it seems that the lasting damage is far more severe and widespread. to some extent you can say that's just because people are emotional/irrational and they are blocking optimal allocation, but maybe the optimal solution does need to take into account how people feel about things. maybe things like terrorism and mass shootings are actually a lot more harmful than the numbers suggest.
  - gnode 8y ago
    The issue is more that due to highly asymmetric reporting, people wrongly estimate what the risks to themselves and loved ones are. This means that we don't act rationally in our own interests, to best avoid harm. I think most parents would care more about road safety, carbon monoxide poisoning, mental health, etc. than about terrorism or school shootings, if they were aware of the statistics.
- mulmen 8y ago
blattimwind 8y ago
> Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. How many people do you know that were killed or injured in a terrorist attack? Second order? Same question for {murdered, illness, natural cause}. Compare magnitudes.
- 13of40 8y ago
  I knew a person whose brother in law was killed in 9/11 and another guy whose best friend was shot down in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Trouble is I really can't compare it to the scads of relatives of friends who have undoubtably died of cancer or heart disease, because those just aren't the kind of stories people swap on a fishing trip.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
craftyguy 8y ago
> when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife What leads you to believe that was ever a major cause of death for more than a tiny handful of people? It would seem the hardships of living before modern medicine and (any) agriculture would have killed far more people. Given how expensive/risky it was to collect food, why would any group of folks risk most of their healthy, strong brood to wage regional conflict? If they lost, all of them would lose by virtue of losing the most capable members of the society.

owenshen24 8y ago

Hey everyone, I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction! I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process. ^_^

mars4rp 8y ago
The coloring of the chart is awful, alzheimer and terrorism having almost identical color.
- soSadSoSorry 8y ago
  Oh you!
- troels 8y ago
  I have to concur. I was confused for a moment about the staggering number of deaths caused by terrorism, until I realised what was going on.
- owenshen24 8y ago
  That's an easily remediable fix!
darkerside 8y ago
I think the concept here is fascinating. One thing I didn't see addressed was that it's not totally unexpected for rare causes of death to be overrepresented in the news (apocryphally, it's been said that "dog bites man" is not news--"man bites dog" is). That said, it seems like the modern short news cycle has edged out attention being paid to long term trends (kidney disease mortality prevalence was surprising to me as well).
owenversteeg 8y ago
Hello, Owen, from another Owen! I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it! One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all? Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?

qznc 8y ago

They use media coverage and conflate it with "general public sentiment" and how "people think we die". While the wording seems to be carefully crafted that it avoids stating something outright wrong, it does suggest that they are the same. Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?

owenshen24 8y ago
There are! The most famous one is this one https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/22549/Slovic_089.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794... and the results are largely in-line w/ what one might expect. > Two kinds of bias were identified: (a) a tendency to overestimate small frequencies and underestimate larger ones, and (b) a tendency to exaggerate the frequency of some specific causes and to underestimate the frequency of others, at any given level of objective frequency
- lqdc13 8y ago
  Problem with such use of statistics is that we underestimate black swan events. Humans are intuitively better at it. For example, it would be impossible to predict something like 911 event with such frequentist analysis. Also impossible to predict some sort of nuclear disaster terrorist act that never happened before and could take a million lives. Another thing to keep in mind is the "missing life" (dying young) and quality of life after disease. That's why something like Alzheimer's seems a lot worse than heart disease.
  - im3w1l 8y ago
    Yeah "dying of war" is much more likely than you would think by looking at what Americans died of last 10 years. The same could go for anything that happens rarely but kills a lot of people when it does. 911 was probably too few deaths to make an impact in the statistics though. You'd need something killing tens of millions of people

osteele 8y ago

Cf. xkcd #1468 How worried you should be when various things happen to you in movies vs. real life. https://www.xkcd.com/1468/ https://www.xkcd.com/1468/

tejohnso 8y ago
Seems like there's a joke about movies portraying chest wounds on one's left side being much more serious than on the right side. But I don't get it.
- garblegarble 8y ago
  >Seems like there's a joke about movies portraying chest wounds on one's left side being much more serious than on the right side I'm guessing it's because your heart is on the left (unless you have situs inversus), so he's arguing movies treat a chest wound on the left as hitting the heart
  - baking 8y ago
    It's a movie cliche. Shot on the left side, you are a gonner. Shot on the right, you'll be just fine. So you don't have to worry about whether your favorite character is going to make it to the end of the movie or not.

pmoriarty 8y ago

There's a fascinating documentary called "A Certain Kind of Death",[1] which shows what happens in the US when someone dies with no next of kin. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErooOhzE268 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErooOhzE268

partycoder 8y ago

According to the charts, most people die of cardiovascular disease and cancer. First, most people think their habits and diet are not leading them to a cardiovascular disease. Then, those conditions that primarily afflict a specific demographic. So it might not be as relevant to someone who is let's say, less than 40 years old.

perilunar 8y ago
Which is a good thing, because it means most people are dying of old age. You can't officially die of "old age" so if you avoid or survive everything else, eventually you are going die from cancer or heart disease. Problem is though, if you improve cancer treatment then more people will die of heart disease, and vice versa. We really need a category for "died peacefully of advanced age", where we can try hard to increase the death rate.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dbatten 8y ago

So, the media reports on rare, interesting things, not mundane everyday things? I'm shocked!

losteric 8y ago
The news is supposed to keep the public informed... fusing of entertainment and information, along with corporate mergers, has brought us to this unhealthy state of public awareness. Our society is becoming more paranoid because it boosts ratings and profit. A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year.
- GW150914 8y ago
  Fear of terrorism isn’t just fear of dying from terrorism. What was the economic damage or 9/11?
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Pretty sure the actual economic damage ($250B) from 9/11 attacks was small compared to the self-inflicted economic damage that followed in the form of market reactions $1T and wars $2T. In other words, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
    - GW150914 8y ago
      Factor in the two wars and you’re talking a further 6+ trillion. Call it self inflicted or not, it seems disingenuous to act like it all wasn’t a direct and predictable result of the attacks. I’m not discussing blame after all, but consequences and what poeple reasonably fear.
- rs999gti 8y ago
  > A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year. The same thing could be said for the gun control narrative being pushed by the media and politicians. If gun deaths are classified as homicides and using CDC numbers, they account for less than 1% of deaths. However, looking at the same data on the site for the Guardian and NYT, it looks like the wild west out there and homicides are the leading cause of death next to cancer.

robryan 8y ago

The mainstream commercial news in Australia seems to cover every unusual death that has occurred in the past day. I guess those kind of stories rate well.

jchw 8y ago

Many people are pointing out that it's pretty obvious the news reports more on rarer events. True, but also people don't necessarily realize this when watching the news. I can anecdotally guarantee some of my family members fully believe that homicides are responsible for significantly more deaths than cancer.

DrScump 8y ago

This week's episode of Science Goes to the Movies[0] was a repeat from last summer on Emergency Medicine as portrayed in film/TV vs reality: [0] http://www.cuny.tv/show/sciencegoestothemovies/PR2006291 http://www.cuny.tv/show/sciencegoestothemovies/PR2006291

baking 8y ago

100% of people die from being born. If this data is not segregated by age, it is pretty much meaningless. People don't die of "natural causes" or "old age" any more because the doctors are required to list something previously diagnosed on the death certificate (or else the doctor is looking at a lawsuit.) And the family member who happens to be there at the time of death is in no mood to put up an argument. No one wants to do an autopsy and invasive tests for a frail failing elderly patient are even worse.

fastball 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make. Are you saying that dying of heart disease and cancer are over-diagnosed? Why does that matter in the context of this analysis? It's a comparison between CDC data and news coverage -- any "over-diagnosis" (or under-diagnosis) should be reflected in all datasets equally, so it doesn't really effect the overall review.
- baking 8y ago
  Everyone dies. The only significance of death is if it occurs sooner than otherwise expected. For the vast majority of people that die in old age what to list on the death certificate can be a conundrum, but it is safe to say no one will ever be sued for malpractice if heart disease is listed as the cause of death. 80% of all deaths due to heart disease occur in the 65 and older population. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2015-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea... EDIT: Take the data from the above table multiply the deaths by the number of "years of life lost" (65 minus the mid-range age for each column) and ignoring the 65 and older age group and I think you might see a better correlation with news coverage.
  - proxygeek 8y ago
    This is actually a very good point. I was thinking myself something along similar lines that intuitively speaking, death by unnatural causes like terrorism/homicide/suicide are of course more "newsworthy" than the ones due to "heart-disease". Although the study is trying to do a larger scale comparison between the perceived and actul leading causes of deaths, it would serve it much better if it were to segment the results by age group.

raarts 8y ago

Would be interesting to see this data for other countries, and comparing for example the overrepresentation factors for violence and terrorism.

nemild 8y ago

This is awesome! You might really like All the News That's Fit to Sell which is a deep dive into the media economics behind why things are covered — it gives lots of color for why coverage is the way it is (there's a famous journalism saying: "If it bleeds, it leads" — which speaks to the readership/profits that come from covering vivid deaths) If useful, I did a similar analysis, but just for the NY Times vs WHO/CDC (I manually tagged an year of articles by cause of death vs. this article's ability to see across many years): In 2015-6, the deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html You can also extend the analysis to see how death coverage varies by region (those who are culturally similar to us get more coverage): How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

owenshen24 8y ago
This is super great! Thanks for sharing!

caseymarquis 8y ago

Huh. Something like 1 in 20 people will likely have their lives end in a car accident.

gkfasdfasdf 8y ago
It's more like 1 in 100 (in America): http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...
baking 8y ago
I think the data is for "unintentional injury" (or death from injury excluding homicide or suicide.) This category is actually the number one cause of death for ages 1-44. The numbers are fairly constant from ages 15 to 64 but the rate jumps up by a factor of 2.5 after age 65. Assuming that retirees are not just taking up sky diving, this is probably due to increased frailty and hospitalizations caused by falls. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2015-a.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea... EDIT: It seems that in addition to car accidents, poisoning, overdoses, and falls, make up the vast majority of this category.

frostycakepie 8y ago

Our brains look for/create drama + drama gets views. To the first point, I’m reading the book Factfulness, and it covers this stuff pretty eye openingly we’ll.

arca_vorago 8y ago

I'd love to see room for competition in media that took a different path if it wasn't already all monopolies and bribes cough lobbying and the innefectuality of the FCC in it's mandate. A strong fourth estate is essential to the proper functioning of the constitutional democractic republic.

CalRobert 8y ago

Thanks!! It's kind of amazing how skewed our view of reality is. Saying "I don't care about terrorism" gets you dirty looks but is a reasonable approach to life if you live in wealthy country and are are trying to worry about things most likely to affect you. I care about gun violence and knew it was overreported, but it blew my mind to find out that there are about twice as many deaths per year from just asbestos are there are gun homicides. I wonder how many other misconceptions there are? (Total gun deaths is much higher due to suicide and accidents)

hansthehorse 8y ago
When presented with gun violence statistics ask them to take out gang related and suicide then you can more accurately use the information.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  Well, those statistics aren't wrong, they just tell a different story. Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. Gang-related violence... I'm not sure why I'd exclude that? They're human beings. The term also is very unevenly applied and laws meant to target "gang-related violence" have a tendency to burden minorities more heavily. (See also: "terrorism") https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/how-do-you-define-a-gang-member.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/how-do-you-defin...
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides. The main prevention measure for both murder and suicide is to reduce access to methods. It's fine for a nation to say they make the choice not to restrict access to guns, but they need to be honest about the increased numbers of people dying this will cause.
    - LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
      Reduce access to the methods to end ones life? Is this irony?

ObeyTheGuts 8y ago

this nonsense, as you need check YOUNG PEOPLE deaths, ye old die from disease, but that is general accepted path, what perfect news would blast is causes that kill people in their prime

emj 8y ago

It's actually worse, because you have to factor in media attention, advertisement, bias etc to things that makes the problem worse; e.g. most of those hearts and respitory deaths can be attributed to pollution and lack of exercise, that means the car and all that it brings. You are inundated with positive coverage of cars all over, they are vehemently supported in most pieces and comments. Pair that with; Heart Disease 10.388 Under Car Accidents 2.285 Under Lower Respiratory Disease 3.520 Under

lalp1 8y ago

Another good example that "data" is not always meaningful. The graphs help the idea "media are talking too much about terrorism". All deaths are not equal. Most of old people die naturally from an heart failure or cancer, that the natural process of death. Homicides and accidents are not natural but common. Terrorism is an exception, that's why it so much covered. 100 old people dying from cancer do not worth 1 minute of press coverage, a family killed by a truck in a christmas market a bit more.

ArchTypical 8y ago
It's not even so much about the rarity of events, but the violation of Informed Consent. The fundamental assumption in modern society is that you know there are dangers and their relative frequency, so that you may make decisions based on that for you to reach a mental equilibrium of risk vs reward. Someone/something acting psuedo-randomly to violate that equilibrium to an extreme (where there are brutally less choices available due to paralysis or fatal event for an individual or group) is what people react to. They want to incorporate these semi-random events into their daily equilibrium in the form of perceived patterns. This eventually leads to more extreme views (some form of theoretical pattern that fits), in lieu of data.

coldtea 8y ago

>"Although all diseases claim almost 1,OOO times as many lives as do homicides, there were about three times as many articles about homicides than about all diseases. Furthermore, homicide articles tended to be more than twice as long as articles reporting deaths from diseases and accidents." Doesn't that make sense? If diseases kill 1000x more people, they are not news -- they're same old, what has been going on since forever. Now, if there a novel disease or epidemic, sure, that would get coverage.