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Does the news reflect what we die from?
- theandrewbailey 7y agoBetteridge's law wins: No.
- olau 7y agoThere are two parts to terrorism: doing something terrible, and spreading the word to upset and frighten lots of people. It's one of the oddities of modern Western societies that you can end up in jail for donating to what you think is a liberation movement in another country, but when the New York Times and The Guardian are making money by doing the second part of terrorism in their home countries, nothing happens.
- blunte 7y agoThis is fascinating, but I am greatly disappointed that Foxnews wasn't included. I would love to see their stacked bar...
- protomyth 7y agoIt probably wouldn't differ that much from the NY Times. I would also expect MSNBC to be about the same. Its the angle that is the difference and not so much the subject. The big networks pretty much fall in line on topics. I think there was a study posted a long while back here on HN, but it had something to do with the NYT.
- boomboomsubban 7y agoConsidering the massive overrepresentation of terrorism and homicide already shown, I doubt it's much different.
- sridca 7y agoThe corollary is people self-censoring news that does pertain to facts rather than over-sensationalism. Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052590
- wjmao88 7y agoThe relative graphs over time at the bottom should have been the main feature in this article. The causes vs coverage at any particular time is not meaningful. How media coverage changes in relation to how causes of death changes is the better indicator of reporting bias. If A caused 50% death last year and 50% death this year, and B caused 10% death last year and 20% death this year, I would expect an unbiased media to ignore A and report heavily on B.
- mevile 7y agoA pattern I noticed is that media coverage is biased towards the things that kill us that we don't have as much control over. I imagine people know heart disease is a huge killer but they also know they can make lifestyle changes to prevent it and they know what those changes need to be.
- reallydude 7y ago> biased towards the things that kill us that we don't have as much control over. It's not about what we have control over, but what we have information about. Informed consent is the bedrock of western society, from the enlightenment period. I suspect fear mongering (and terrorism) is effective precisely because westerners are trained to define unknowns and mitigate danger. Some go so far as to be outraged that someone hasn't preternaturally predicted how an unknown could have been dealt with.
- tych0 7y agoI agree that we cover terrorism too much in the news. However, if you look at the date ranges for what is arguably the most important graph in the post: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/10/Causes-of-death-vs-media-coverage.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/10/Causes-of-death-v... They run from 1999-2016 for both the news organizations, and from 2004-2016 for the Google searches. 9/11 happened in 2001, so of course there were going to be lots of articles about that, and less searches if you exclude that time period. The deaths were selected from 2016 alone, which is maybe reasonable, but then why select articles from a range of years elsewhere? Certainly there were more deaths in 2001 from terrorism than any other year in this range, so excluding it from some things while including it in others seems like an act of Hanlon if nothing else.
- maxwell 7y agoWorth checking out their data on terrorism: https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism Particularly outside North America: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-terrorism-fatalities-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-terrorism-fatal...
- andrewla 7y agoThis entire analysis is predicated on ignoring tail risk. Most causes of death are pretty normal events; if we took no measures to prevent any of them then chances are most of them would increase by very small amounts; maybe doubling for the most dramatic cases. Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause. The lack of deaths is not a function of desire on the part of terrorists to cause death, but just their ability to do so. In some ways this is similar to the reaction to nuclear power -- even though practically speaking it is very safe, if it were to go wrong, it could got wrong on a scale that is not really possible for almost any other source of energy. Regulations and safety practices can go a long way towards mitigating this, but the tail risk remains a huge unknown, not in the probability sense, but in the negative impact sense.
- indigochill 7y ago>The lack of deaths is not a function of desire on the part of terrorists to cause death, but just their ability to do so. I don't necessarily agree. Terrorists are people with a point to make who view violence as the preferable way to make it (usually out of desperation). Numbers are pretty much never the point (any more than companies set out to kill as many people as possible with pollutants). The symbol is what's important. The world trade center. Mosques. Gay bars. All representative of what the attacker views as a corrupting influence on society in their own worldview.
- salty_biscuits 7y agoI also suspect that if it was less widely disseminated a different strategy would be used, i.e. just actually going for military or government infrastructure rather than trying to sway public opinion. Terrorism is a political act,it is all about sending a message.
- Isamu 7y ago>Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause. I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical limit, but important none the less. It is important to recognize the order of magnitude of the probability of the risk. At CERN they don't publicize that there is a long-tail risk of causing the destruction of the world because the probability, though non-zero, is exceedingly tiny (and people freak out, unable to think about tiny probabilities.)
- team-o 7y agoNatural deaths seem less newsworthy to me than unnatural deaths.
- ddxxdd 7y agoAgreed. The purpose of the news is to hold our government accountable, and mitigating kidney disease is not a fundamental part of governance.
- kraftman 7y agoThe purpose of news is to inform about current events, not specifically for holding the government accountable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 50656E6973 7y agoWhere did you get the idea that the news is only supposed to talk about the government? Even if that's true, how can the masses be expected to make informed political decisions on things like healthcare funding vs. war on terror funding if they're constantly being terrorized by the news about a negligible threat while ignoring much greater immediate threats?
- newswriter99 7y agoI haven't clicked the OP's link but I can already answer with confidence: No. 1-Don't write a headline as a question 2-Don't write a headline with a question that can be answered "no".
- mxfh 7y agoThe oddest one are road deaths to me at 4x below cancer, apparently taken for granted at any stage of life, but mostly avoidable with some policy changes.
- dudul 7y agoYou make it sound very trivial to reduce road deaths. Which policy changes do you have in mind?
- techiferous 7y agoMoving toward walkable cities (investing more in pedestrian, bike and public transit infrastracture and less in car infrastructure).
- umvi 7y agoCrack down harder on DUI. DUI kills more innocents than guns.
- noir_lord 7y agoIt’s policed heavily in the UK and there is a fuck tonne of social pressure as well. It’s pretty effective all said and done.
- ineedasername 7y agoIt probably helps that mass transit is much more prevalent. In New York state for example, where the population is heavily weighted towards New York City where mass transit is more accessible, the % of traffic fatalities related to alcohol drops to about 5%, not far out of line for all of UK. (Though urban areas like London in the UK might be even lower
- s1artibartfast 7y agoI'm skeptical that harsher DUI penalties are the appropriate solution. Most states already have significant DUI penalties, and think that increasing them is largely a PR move. Drunk drivers are involved in about 20% of fatal accidents, leaving 80% to other causes[1]. About 30% of fatal accidents involve speeding [2]. Perhaps we should consider similar penalties for speeding as for DUI. Drunk drivers do kill more "innocents" than guns, but also keep in mind that very few gun deaths are innocents. 97% of gun deaths are homicide or suicide [3] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812630 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017-DCA15SS002-BMG-statement-o.pdf https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017-DCA15SS002-B... https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/11/18135976/gun-deaths-us-2017-suicide https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/11/18135976/gun-d...
- INTPenis 7y agoI think this is a great article because it yet again shows how news are only there for terrify and manipulate. Perhaps not always conscious, because they need their jobs and their jobs are to fill a 24 hour cycle with news. And nobody wants to hear about cancer and heart disease, it bums them out.
- randyrand 7y agonews is mainly for entertainment.
- dylan604 7y agoBut it's not. Sheeple/masses have been trained into that concept, but Edward Murrow is probably rolling in his grave at the fact. Have you spent time with reporters, specifically TV? The real newsies hate doing the fluff stories, or the must carry by their corporate owners. They want to just do the news. Of course, there are the ones that are just hoping to be the next entertainment star as you have accept news programming to be.
- LoSboccacc 7y agowait, no. even at an epistemological level news are data outliers, otherwise they'd be journals while lots of outlets do are manipulative, it's the concept itself of news that shift the reporting bias here.
- itcheeze 7y agoThere is a good book I read about this years ago (pre-9/11) called The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner. It went in depth into the different things that people are afraid of and how they are covered in the media vs what you are actually likely to die from. Definitely made me think a little differently about what I saw on the news for good or bad.
- rotrux 7y agoNo. It reflects what we are worried about dying from. Instead of <likelihood of thing being in the news> = f(<probability of dying from thing>) It's more like: <likelihood of thing being in the news> = f(<probability of dying from thing>) * g(<scariness of dying from thing>)
- megaremote 7y agoBut our worries are influenced by what we see on the news.
- rotrux 7y agoYep. Capitalism-induced feedback loop. That said, more people are going to pay attention to a newscast about terrorism than one about, say, how the yellow dye used in legal pads is poisonous. If you think about it, I'm actually more likely to accidentally ingest a legal pad.
- theobon 7y agoThe most interesting tidbit for me was how similar the news breakdown was between the two sources: New York Times and The Guardian. The largest deviation was 3.4% for suicide coverage but almost everything was within 1%. Perhaps these examples are too similar to get a good distribution but if news organizations are all covering basically the same items perhaps there is an opportunity for differentiation. The google search trends shows that what people are interested in knowing doesn't match what media is interested in telling.
- ineedasername 7y agoI wish they had chosen a different, or a third source though. I rate NYT & The Guardian (though both of decent quality) as fairly similar in editorial outlook.
- koyote 7y agoI also found this very interesting. I'd like to see a similar graph with different media outlets from around the world.
- owenshen24 7y agoEven as the person who wrote the scraping code for the original project, I'm a little suspect myself of the news data because of how similar the two distributions turn out to be. I think the strong similarity is an artifact of our data collection process, rather than reflecting some very deep truth about the similarity of the two sources. Or of sources in general. My priors are that the distribution should have looked more different, but I just didn't do extra verification at the time.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago> "What's interesting is that Americans search on Google is a much closer reflection of what kills us than what is presented in the media..." This is because the key driver of what the mainstream media reports is how well a given topic will increase the bottomline. Pardon the editorial, but this is what passes for journalism currently. Sadly the media drinks their own Kool Aid, believes their own press releases, and continues to trumpet its own importance, even when the data/evidence consistently tells otherwise.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- derefr 7y ago> This is because the key driver of what the mainstream media reports is how well a given topic will increase the bottomline. Counterpoint: there are news sources that don't have a profit motive, e.g. BBC News. They still do this same kind of reporting. For them, it's not about their bottom line. So... what is it about?
- chiefalchemist 7y agoCareer, ego, "conventional wisdom", riot mentality, etc. All those aside, it's naive to think the BBC doesn't track ratings, do market research, etc. They might not have a traditional purely financial bottomline but they still have a bottomline, as well as someone to report to about results, etc.
- davemp 7y agoI'm sure BBC News still has some sort of metrics that it presents to people for budgeting/promotions.
- derefr 7y agoYes, but the question is, why are these metrics chosen in a way that incentivizes BBC News reporters to follow exactly the same kind of sensationalist stories as for-profit news sources?
- cmenge 7y agomeh... - "Are car reviews watched proportional to car sales?" Seems Ferrari has really bad sales reps... - "Do food-related articles reflect what we eat?" My pasta-with-a-canned-sauce is still waiting to make it to the cover of Saveur.
- randyrand 7y agoThe news reflects what we're interested in. Most deaths aren't interesting.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoThis makes me ponder: The human brain is wired to be interested in novel, relatively unusual things. So, almost by definition, this implies humans are wired to be relatively disinterested in truth. :/
- Swizec 7y agoWe love surprising truth. We yawn at everyday life.
- BurningFrog 7y agoWe're interested in new truths. Old ones we already know.
- cortesoft 7y agoThis has a common term in the news industry: Man Bites Dog Since 'newsworthy' is synonymous with 'unusual', we end up thinking rare things are actually common, since we only cover rare things in the news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog_(journalism)
- _pastel 7y agoThat's why I love that this article also compared against search trends, which is another way of measuring what we are interested in. Consider "road incidents". Search is disproportionately higher than deaths - we are definitely interested! But news coverage is extremely low, because what is newsworthy about any specific road incident? It's more naunced than "the news reflects what's interesting". Or maybe NYT and The Guardian are just missing out on a big area of reader interest, and they could increase engagement by running more stories about road incidents!
- dawhizkid 7y agoHm. Should the news reflect what we die from...? Glaring omission is deaths from airplane crashes. I would guess that is the most disproportionately covered of any cause of death. I'm also skeptical of the data on drug overdoses. Seems like the opioid epidemic is pretty well-covered these days but listed as only .4% of "Media Coverage" and 1.3% of searches.
- rakoo 7y ago> I would guess that is the most disproportionately covered of any cause of death. 1 death is a tragedy, 1 million death is a statistic. Nuclear falls into the first one, coal into the second.
- megaremote 7y agoIf the news does to proportionally show what we die from, then we all focus on the wrong areas, and vote in politicians who come up with solutions to the wrong areas. For me, the most likely way I have of dying is a car hitting me. Heart disease is not an issue for me as I exercise every single day and eat, and cancer is not a concern as I do the above and anything else will not affect it significantly.
- dylan604 7y ago> Heart disease is not an issue for me as I exercise every single day and eat, and cancer is not a concern as I do the above and anything else will not affect it significantly. If only it were that simple. Yes, exercise greatly decreases the risk of certain things as a healthy body is just that much more resilient. However, please get yourself checked at your regular 10k, 20k, 30k miles. Life happens in funny ways. Don't be an edge case. Also, if you live in California, you have to be super careful of all the cancer causing things that are only known to the state of California.
- closeparen 7y agoArguably the whole health/fitness/diet genre should count as coverage of death due to age and lifestyle factors.
- kpwagner 7y agoShould media coverage accurately reflect what we die from? I don't think so. Cause of death is not the only reason to be interested in terrorism, homicide, and suicide. These charts are eye-candy, and while I respect the work that went into producing them, I believe they are simply trying to spin a story instead of addressing the title's topic.
- mr_toad 7y ago> Should media coverage accurately reflect what we die from? People need to be aware that media coverage is disproportionately focused on certain causes of death.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pdm55 7y agoI heard an ICU physician say that here in Australia a cause of death must be put on the death certificate and that the usual choice is "myocardial infarction" (heart attack). Whereas a better choice might be simply "old age", but this is not an acceptable cause. So I guess that this is one of the reasons why "heart attack" is listed as the most common cause of death.
- vagab0nd 7y agoWhy is "old age" a better choice? Usually there's some kind of a disease that can't be handled by the aging body. Is it because it's not worth it to identify what the disease is?
- Retra 7y agoA whole chain of things need to happen for you to die, but they typically culminate in starving the brain of nutrients or oxygen. That usually happens due to organ failure, and that can certainly be the eventual consequence of old age. So tying 'cause of death' to a single factor is almost always a gross oversimplification. There are many causes for every death, and it's only important to look at specific ones should you care to prevent them or assign blame for them.
- owenshen24 7y agoHey HN, I'm the lead person who did the original data collection. We were previously featured when I made the initial site here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840237 Happy to answer more questions people might have about methodology or the analysis in the original study.
- olau 7y agoI know this is perhaps besides the point: but I'm surprised that traffic incident reporting is so low - but then aren't you scraping more intellectual news media than what I would imagine most people would be reading? Not very familiar with the English/American news situation.
- Arnt 7y agoYou can do a low-quality check easily. Read some medium that you suspect will be different from NYT/G for a week and count how many traffic accidents were reported in a particular locale, and how many reports there were for each. Then call the police and ask how many there actually were in that week. I can guess what you'll find: What's chosen for reporting is news or otherwise noteworthy events. Traffic accidents may be a cause of death, but that doesn't make them either news or noteworthy. Traffic jams and their causes are an everyday occurence, even if the cause involves someone being driven off in an ambulance.
- owenshen24 7y agoI would have loved a more comprehensive search of media. We opted for NYT/G because they had the friendliest APIs given our time constraints.
- samat 7y agoI am very interested to see - comparison of the share of deaths to the share of google searches; - comparison of google searches to the media coverage of deaths. Would it be possible for you to generate those two?
- 7y ago
- ternaryoperator 7y agoThis data is based on causes of death defined purely physically. It's a shame that in a world as complex as ours, we still don't attach psychological explanations and categorize them as causes too. Why not: he died of loneliness? He died of a broken heart? Or economic ones: He died because he couldn't afford the healthcare he needed? He died because he couldn't pay the heating bill and they turned it off? Perhaps then we could get a different handle on the issues that face us, especially that face the elderly, and be more responsive.
- jamesrcole 7y agoAlong these lines, how much do various cognitive biases and false beliefs contribute to deaths?
- mpweiher 7y agoConsidering your first two, loneliness and broken heart, these would probably fall under suicide, which is 1.8%. So I am not sure you'd be getting a significant new insight into major causes.
- ternaryoperator 7y agoWe don't know, because suicide is the only category on the chart that reflects a psychological factor. If we tracked (more correctly, if we could track) people dying of loneliness but who don't commit suicide, perhaps we'd find the number to be hugely higher. When I look at the sadness of the elderly in large cities, my sense is that number would be a lot higher. But we just don't know.
- slimsag 7y agoTo some extent we do know. We know people who are lonely tend to be less active, and we know people who are less active tend to have worse health. On the Greek island of Ikaria for example[1], we know that people regularly live to be 90 years old and that even at that age they remain incredibly social and physically active. [1] http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171116-the-greek-island-with-the-key-to-longevity http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171116-the-greek-island-wi...
- tontonius 7y agoAllow me to guess: no. With the simple addition "why would they?"
- 0898 7y agoEvery year in the United States, 225,000 people die iatrogenic deaths. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, iatrogenesis is the third largest cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer. Iatrogenic. What is that word? Is it a disease, an accident, or something you get from smoking? In fact iatrogenic means inadvertent death caused by a doctor or a hospital. Why don’t they just say that? I guess it isn’t exactly in medicine’s best interests to put it in simple language that anybody can understand.
- charlescearl 7y agoThe problem that I have with Our World in Data is the how the counting is so biased AF As an example https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/white/index https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/white/index VS https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/black/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/black/index.h... That is, if you are a Black Male in the US between 15 and 35, yes homicide is how you are more likely to go. And that news becomes very important to Black mothers, fathers, grandparents. The real — as in US government stats — on infant and maternal mortality are also worse than many Caribbean countries. My takeaway is that there are different “world”s within countries — especially for marginalized groups where the country doesn’t have the will or resources for a safety net.