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What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on

• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• eawgewag 1y ago
  Excellent post, and thank you for sharing.
• daft_pink 1y ago
  I think this would be more useful if compared early death statistics to news reporting. Everyone dies and everyone knows that everyone dies. I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death. I think there’s probably still a difference in media reporting and probability but i’m guessing younger people 20-30 are most likely to die from vehicle accidents, accidents, suicide and drugs? I’m not sure though and I don’t have any evidence.
  • kulahan 1y ago
    Avoiding an early death is a lifelong commitment to health. Knowing what the greatest dangers are helps direct your actions in support of that.
  • bell-cot 1y ago
    There's quite a bit available about that. Search for "Years of Life Lost" or "Years of Potential Life Lost". Or for a quick start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost
  • rybosworld 1y ago
    I get what you're saying but on the flipside, heart disease is primarily not age-related. Something like 80%-90% of cases are preventable through lifestyle choices. And it's the number one cause of death. Cancer at #2 is more age-related. But that too is fairly preventable. Roughly 50% of cancers are thought to be related to poor lifestyle choices. Point being - these are major causes of early death.
    • bad_haircut72 1y ago
      I wonder what has a bigger impact on longevity, lifestyle choices or being a multi-millionaire with access to the best healthcare.
      • Jtsummers 1y ago
        Despite their wishes, most people won't become millionaires. The part you can control is your own lifestyle. For the average person, this means your lifestyle will have more impact on your longevity than wishful thinking about one day being a multi-millionaire who can hire doctors to fix the problems you created by being sedentary, eating poorly, and overindulging on alcohol or other substances.
      • viccis 1y ago
        Wonder which is more realistic, address the horribly unhealthy eating patterns that are drilled into US citizens as soon as they start eating school lunches (if not before), or make all of us multi-millionaires with access to the best healthcare.
        • hermannj314 1y ago
          If you're a news agency, promise your viewers that if they just get angry enough then that free healthcare will be coming soon and then show them an ad from McDonalds and Eli Lilly.
      • recursive 1y ago
        You should also weight those with how practically attainable they are.
      • HardCodedBias 1y ago
        Being a "multi-millionaire with access to the best healthcare" in the US means that you sit in the same queues as everyone else. The best you can do is concierge care, but that only expedites primary care everything in the US is about specialists.
  • Theodores 1y ago
    Most lives can be summarised with a birth certificate and a death certificate. For most people, everything that happens between birth and death is not newsworthy by any stretch of the imagination. I count myself in this demographic and this does not mean I live a totally dull and boring life! You could spend your whole life as the pillar of the community with time for everyone and without an enemy in the world, to live a whole 100 years. Along the way you might have made hundreds of friends and given so much to the world. However, you aren't going to make the news. Meanwhile, a five year old that gets to meet an nasty brutal end could be in the paper for weeks, with the whole town turning out for the funeral and the whole nation taking note. The five year old would not have lived long enough to 'achieve' anything beyond potty training, yet many words could be written about them. This is just how the world works. The thing is though, there has been much progress in recent decades on what works for longevity. It is not complicated, you just have to eat mostly plants, get about mostly with your own feet, say hello to people, stay away from the toxic chemicals and keep the old grey cells busy. Accident and communicable disease permitting, you should be able to live longer than your ancestors ever did, with a better 'healthspan'. If you look at the adverts that pay for the news, everything is working against you. They want to get you to be car dependent and wasting lots of money on highly processed food that slowly gets you. Even by watching the news, you are spending time that could be spent in the company of actual human beings. If the news was to report on what people do die from, as in the non-communicable diseases that go with car dependency and a high-fat diet devoid of fibre, then they would not be 'advertiser friendly'.
  • some_random 1y ago
    What's an early death though? A 98 year old dying of prostate cancer probably isn't, and a 19 year old dying of heart failure probably is, but what about a 55 year old lifetime smoker dying of lung cancer? If a terminally ill 80 year old chooses to end their own life, is that an early death?
• constantcrying 1y ago
  The idea that this is some form of bias is bizarre. The question people are asking isn't "why do people die", it is "why do healthy people die". The answer to the former is obvious, the answer to the later is informative about the world we live in.
  • BoiledCabbage 1y ago
    > why do healthy people die Except the majority of people in the US at least aren't healthy. So why are we elevating that question to be something that should be discussed nightly when it doesn't affect most people (as shown by death rates by cause)? That's still a specific choice with wide ranging implications. Not saying we should or shouldn't report on it, but saying your question has pretty deeply ground assumptions on "importance". And it is not a given.
  • rozab 1y ago
    This is not a good rebuttal since it still does not explain why terrorism gets 20,000 times more representation than accidents (which are mostly road traffic accidents).
• bell-cot 1y ago
  Um, yes? Whatever proper-citizen platitudes 80% of people might give when asked "why do you watch the news?" questions, the "if it bleeds, it leads" reality was obvious back when Rome was still a one-horse town.
• kube-system 1y ago
  Absolutely insane that this article doesn't recognize that there is a human interest difference in untimely death, and poor health and old age. The news isn't supposed to be representative cross-section of reality. If it was, 99.9% of the newscast would be "most people went to work today, fed their family, went home and slept." The news is there to tell you the outliers of today's events.
  • hydrogen7800 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
  • femiagbabiaka 1y ago
    Some level of editorializing is always going to be needed to distinguish signal from noise, but to be clear, the point of cable news is to tell you that everything is on fire, all the time. And that’s not because it’s some sort of normative ideal, but rather that the skinner machine figured out that humans watch that stuff more than something more representative of reality.
    • kube-system 1y ago
      There are a lot of valid criticisms of the modern news media landscape. But I think one thing is for sure -- they're not a public health raw data reporting system. There is nothing newsworthy about "heart disease" written on death certificates of people dying in old age. This is a fact more appropriate for a health class.
  • glimshe 1y ago
    Your argument makes sense, but also ignores that people's perception of relative risk is greatly influenced by the news. You indirectly created a bag called "timely death" as if it were "non postponable death". What I mean is that the time of "timely deaths" can be influenced by human action. If most people die of cancer and heart disease, we should work on avoiding an early death from these causes. If we can add 2 years of time to our "timely" death of heart disease by eating better, we should do so instead of worrying about terrorism.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• carlosjobim 1y ago
  The premise of the article is incredibly stupid into a super-dimensional level of stupidity unheard of before. It is not news that people die. Everybody dies. You who are reading this is going to die. I am going to die. Every person you have ever heard of and not heard of is going to die. Terrorism and homicide are not natural causes of death, and naturally upsetting and naturally newsworthy. Unless the authors of the article want the news to make headlines that people die of natural causes, then we can only interpret it that they want to tone down deaths by homicide and terrorism and try to paint those happenings as "no big deal". Which might very well be the cause among the sick dimension of top academia.
  • buellerbueller 1y ago
    The premise of the article is that this kind of reporting has actual policy effects. You just just missed their point because of your disdain for their "super-dimensional level of stupidity".
  • gdulli 1y ago
    We definitely should adjust coverage of homicide (by either tone, volume, who knows) until people are no longer disproportionately living in fear of it or in fear of cities. But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is the point, it's how they control people.
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      All homicides should be reported in the news. At least in the local news. These are things that are very important locally, although generally not nationally. Even if you could ban all news in an effort to make everybody live as enlightened hackers with disregard to worldly matters, you would still find that homicide is news which spreads like wildfire through word of mouth. It has been like this for hundreds of thousands of years.
      • gdulli 1y ago
        If it's a friend or family member then I'll find out without it being on the news. A random one-off murder is neither interesting nor useful to me unless there's a pattern to it which could threaten me, which is very rarely the case. Living in fear is a choice.
• mk_chan 1y ago
  This is very important to write on. A lot of people believe news is worth consuming for the truth and often cite it as a primary source of information. News producers may not necessarily lie but they cherry pick to maximize reach and that content plays on peoples belief that what they see on the news is all the information you need. The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.
  • whycome 1y ago
    It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth. I’ve noticed a couple incidents recently where the news just literally had the facts wrong and the Wikipedia article for the related topic ended up in this weird limbo until the news stories were updated despite more relevant sources being available.
    • patates 1y ago
      Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story. It's usually the "which truths get picked and which not" part that gets tricky. Wikipedia makes its own compilation, so citing facts out of newspapers doesn't sound too bad.
      • csours 1y ago
        More concretely, a newspaper (or other media) will use facts like "Police Media Officer Jones stated that ....". It is factually correct that Officer Jones stated "....". Whether Media Officer Jones' statement is correct and comprehensive, that is another matter. Feel free to substitute "Officer Jones" for any other occupation. A very large fraction of news comes from media relations people at the organizations being reported on. Good news agencies will get context from another organization. Great news agencies will sometimes do the kind of digging that makes leaders of large organizations uncomfortable. The costs in time, money, and reputation (even when you get it right) mean that even the very best news agencies can only report a small fraction of stories in depth.
      • 1y ago
• exabrial 1y ago
  With heart disease, we've narrowed it down to pretty much: * get exercise (literally any amount is great) * don't eat more than you should (avoid being overweight) I wish we could do the same with Cancer. California proceeded to elevate the signal-to-noise ratio so high on Cancer however, and it got scooped up in advertising there really is not any really good general advice. Every couple of years theres various trends or crusades for some minority substance that is never scientifically compared to outcomes or risk. Nearly everything could cause cancer, but the nearly everything also wont. Maybe it's just too broad?
  • nradov 1y ago
    For heart disease, effective prevention in some patients requires medication such as statins. Exercise and diet are a great start but not always sufficient due to genetics. Cancer is quite broad. Many of the risk factors such as obesity overlap with heart disease but a lot of patients are still going to randomly get hit regardless of whether they were exposed to certain substances.
• kakacik 1y ago
  Covid has 2.2%? Now thats some serious number for 2023. Not doubting, just feeling that we went through seriously traumatic event as whole mankind, and it feels like subconsiousness is pushing it into distant dream-like story compared to what it actually was and how recently. Or am I the only one feeling about it this way?
  • jansan 1y ago
    The data seems flawed. Also the number at the left chart for homicide with <1% is technically correct, but with the actual number at roughly 0,007% it seems like a bit of an exaggeration.
  • nradov 1y ago
    Determining primary cause of death is often somewhat subjective. Almost everyone listed as a COVID-19 death had other serious co-morbid medical conditions. If a deceased patient had heart failure and type-2 diabetes, and also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, then what killed them in the end? Hard to say. (Same issue applies to influenza etc.)
  • BenFranklin100 1y ago
    For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous month, any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from COVID and jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I believe that doesn’t happen much anymore, at least I hope. I suspect what may be happening is that we have some very sick, elderly people with only weeks to months to live who catch COVID and die. Those deaths may still be counted as COVID deaths.
    • buellerbueller 1y ago
      >For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous month, any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from COVID and jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I believe that doesn’t happen much anymore, at least I hope. [Citation missing.]
    • autoexec 1y ago
      If anything covid deaths are under-counted. While you can't give a single example of someone dying after jumping out of a plane and it being called a covid death there are actual examples of covid deaths and infections being suppressed and hidden from the public. There's also a huge jump in excess deaths unaccounted for by official numbers and some suspicious spikes in flu and pneumonia deaths.
• maypeacepreva1l 1y ago
  Journalism is being attacked by the right, by the left and now this seems like a new passive aggressive way to discredit them. News by definition is something not commonplace, IMO not at all surprising that the more uncommon the death is, more newsworthy it becomes.
  • some_random 1y ago
    If journalists deliver an inaccurate view of the world through their work, they should be criticized for it.
  • bamboozled 1y ago
    I too always thought it was common knowledge that a lot of people die from disease but much fewer die in obscure ways that are reported on.
• jasonthorsness 1y ago
  The news revolves around "new" stuff, not reporting things people generally know. At young and even middle ages, people dying of anything is highly unusual and skews more towards some of the unlikelier causes compared to the breakdown of all deaths. And it's general knowledge that the elderly commonly succumb to heart disease and cancer. I love the site and the article is interesting with good data but I don't think the premise of this article was quite right.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    But by not reporting on things people generally know they end up with skewed knowledge of what they think they know. Thinking that you're going to die of an unlikely cause is generally wrong since it's unlikely, yet talking to younger people that are newsies and they are more likely to think they will die of such rare things.
    • jasonthorsness 1y ago
      The leading cause of death up to early 40s is still accidents so a fixation on heart disease and cancer might send the wrong message too https://wisqars.cdc.gov/pdfs/leading-causes-of-death-by-age-group_2021_508.pdf https://wisqars.cdc.gov/pdfs/leading-causes-of-death-by-age-...
• tptacek 1y ago
  The dubious unstated premise of this piece is that, "newsworthiness" notwithstanding, all causes of death are equally impactful on society. But that's not true. Violent crime and terrorism are destabilizing in ways heart disease and cancer are not. Independent of the prurient interests of the news audience, there can be strong arguments for giving outsized coverage to homicide.
  • wizzwizz4 1y ago
    To ensure they're destabilising?
    • tptacek 1y ago
      I mean, maybe? To engage seriously with the argument, you'd have to account for iatrogenic effects of media intervention. That's an established concern, first with suicidality and increasingly with mass shooters. But you'd also have to consider that poorly covering events that are certain to percolate through the public consciousness might do worse things than covering them accurately. It's a tough question!
• lostmsu 1y ago
  Raw data website for people who are interested in getting their own opinion: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-ag... Discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584294 Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• d_burfoot 1y ago
  A big chunk, perhaps the majority, of the "Accidents" are from cars. Another infographic I observed recently showed that, for children, the risk of death due to traffic accidents was greater than all other risks combined. People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars. If self-driving cars were an experimental drug undergoing a clinical trial, they would cancel the trial at this point because it would be unethical to continue denying the drug to the control group.
  • bsder 1y ago
    > People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars. People should be raving to get rid of cars, period. Proper mass transit is always a better option. Just because cars become self-driving doesn't mean that they are not a negative externality.
  • vel0city 1y ago
    > People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars That's assuming it'll meaningfully reduce the rates of child deaths due to automobiles. You know what will reduce the rate of child fatality due to automobiles for sure and to an even higher degree? Massively reducing the odds kids and automobiles mix. How do we do that? Have more protected walkable and bikeable spaces. Have fewer automobiles driving around. Design our cities better to not have kids walking along narrow sidewalks next to roads where speed limits are marked as 40 but in reality traffic often flows at 55+. Its insane to me there are neighborhoods less than a mile from associated public schools that have to have bus service because there is no safe path for them to walk. What a true failure of city design.
• nicgrev103 1y ago
  Just because I read about more murder than cancer, in the news, doesn't make me think that more people are murdered than die of cancer.
• preommr 1y ago
  I disliked the whole article, but as a quick tangent, the following: > . People are often far more anxious about flying than driving, even though commercial airline crashes are incredibly rare. ...surely can be explained, that if adjusted for non-impaired people and considering the survival rate for when an accident happens, the danger is much lower for cars. The way the article phrases it, makes it sound like the fear is completely baseless.
  • buellerbueller 1y ago
    >...surely can be explained, that if adjusted for non-impaired people and considering the survival rate for when an accident happens, the danger is much lower for cars No. This is false equivalence. You are far more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane, full stop.
    • aeternum 1y ago
      This is an overgeneralization. You are far more likely to die in a C172 airplane than you are in a modern car.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • buellerbueller 1y ago
        Ok, sure, we can go that route and cherry pick examples that are not representative of the trends of the vast majority of flying. I'll even grant that I probably invited it by saying "full stop" on my sentence. Nevertheless, as most of us will never be in a C172, flying in a plane is far safer than being in a car. The least you can do here is be honest about the conversation that is being had. It would be appreciated.
        • aeternum 1y ago
          Agreed, flying in a plane is far safer, it was the full stop thing :) I also would recommend flying in a small plane at least once, the small additional risk is worth the experience.
• neuralRiot 1y ago
  In 2024 4 deaths by shark bite were registered globally and 700000 deaths from heart diseases in the US alone, yet we don’t have a “hearth week” on Discovery channel. Fear sells.
  • izzydata 1y ago
    I think we should have a heart week. I'm sure they could make this scary in order to promote cardio.
• jedberg 1y ago
  Way back in the 90s, I had a hacked satellite dish. This meant that I could get local channels from across the USA. My roommate used this for a school assignment. He looked at how much time local news spent on each topic, categorized by city. Here is what he found: - All newscasts featured crime more than anything else ("if it bleeds it leads"). - All newscasts had a local feel-good story. - All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it). - All newscasts had a local sports update But what was most interesting was what they spend the rest of their time on: - In New York, it was mostly financial news. - In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news. - In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news - In Chicago it was often manufacturing related. That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
  • mc32 1y ago
    Yes, it's filtered, but to a substantial degree it's because that's what the audience wants. If they make money on ads and that revenue depends on eyeball time, then they will want to maximize eyeball time. An exception would be a news org that was funded differently. However that bias while different, would still be present because you only have so many hours in a day and thus can only present things of interest.
    • estearum 1y ago
      What someone “wants” is a complicated question. People “want” all sorts of conflicting and even mutually exclusive things. It would be just as true to say people “want” in-depth, factual understanding of things that are relevant to their lives. The real optimization function is what you say later on: eyeball time. Eyeball time, as anyone with a social media account can tell you, is hardly related to what a person comprehensively wants though.
      • mc32 1y ago
        Yes, people have ideas of what they would do, read and listen to in ideal form. That's what they tell themselves they would want. Reality or practice tells us what they idealize isn't realized by those people. They actually seek something different --often what they are presented in the news, in food, etc. Sometimes there are things that shift behavior (like physician tells them they need to change dietary customs or their psychologist suggests getting out of an echo chamber)
• puttycat 1y ago
  One of the most informative and eye opening articles I found on HN. Thanks for posting.
• aeternum 1y ago
  Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of heart disease and cancer. I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss. For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack. Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate. This difference explains why some cities that feel safe actually have a high homicide rate and vice-versa. In some cities crime is unpredictable whereas in others it is more confined to areas where visitors rarely travel.
  • j-bos 1y ago
    Agreed, this would make for a great standard in mortality metrics.
  • BeetleB 1y ago
    > For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack. All you're saying is that the news coverage is a reflection of the biases people have (like the one above).
    • Braxton1980 1y ago
      Or they report on what they think people would be interested in. I suppose that's a bias but it's an suspicious use of the word. Biases become a problem if a person has one and doesn't take it into account when making a decision. The news is making the coverage decision not the person with the bias unless you count an indirect viewership loss that may occur.
      • jakeydus 1y ago
        Agreed. I think the newscaster joke in arrested development was a solid demonstration of this point. For those who don't know it, the showrunners would frequently insert a news clip of the same reporter summarizing whatever silly plot was going on, ending with: "What this means for your weekend, at 10." Honestly that's what people watch the news for. What are external factors that they were previously unaware of that might impact their lives (or weekends)? Most (not all) people are aware of the dangers posed by heart disease. They're not watching the news to learn about something they're already aware of. I might be beating this horse to a second death, but there's a section of road near where I live that's dangerous, and we all know it's dangerous. It's not newsworthy. If another section of road collapsed and introduced a new danger, then that's newsworthy. News is newsworthy because it's new and unfamiliar. If something is reported on that's old and unfamiliar, then that's a documentary. If it's new and familiar, then that's a paradox. Or maybe a fun anecdote at a party.
• susiecambria 1y ago
  Even if we accept that Americans want to be more and better informed as they say they want to, I don't believe that the desire actually means that they are better informed. People have limited bandwidth and issues are complicated. Take the hep b vaccine as an example. ". . . if a child gets infected with hepatitis B in the first 12 months of life, their chance of going on to develop cerosis or liver cancer is about 90%." (Dr. Paul Offit in Beyond the Noise #82: Jumping without a net https://youtu.be/7pxJb7ANWkc?si=EflkB6VaOx6onP5D https://youtu.be/7pxJb7ANWkc?si=EflkB6VaOx6onP5D) Right now, the CDC recommends the birth dose of the vaccine. And yet the ACIP (CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) is expected to delay the birth dose of the hep B vaccine following the president's statement in September that the vax is unnecessary and therefore be delayed to age 12. I would expect the media to be talking about this. According to the Hepatitis B Foundation, "Hepatitis B, the world’s leading cause of liver cancer, continues to impose a staggering, but preventable, burden on individuals and healthcare systems alike. Without widespread prevention and early intervention, the U.S. is projected to spend more than $44.8 million by 2050 on hepatitis B-related care." (https://www.hepb.org/assets/Uploads/Cost-of-Hep-B.pdf https://www.hepb.org/assets/Uploads/Cost-of-Hep-B.pdf) So we have a practice that can prevent the cancer, save money, and improve lives and the government may totally ignore science and change the vax schedule. Dr. Offit did say in the video that he expects doctors to still provide the vaccine to patients and counsel parents on the need for it. If a major news network reports that ACIP delays the first dose to 12, will they also interview experts? Will parents, grandparents, social workers, early learning professionals, policy wonks, and legislators know to ask questions, have the time or capacity to deal with this at the state level? I would like to believe in people. It's getting harder and harder (on a population level).
  • hunterpayne 1y ago
    You aren't wrong, but you are missing a couple of critical facts. One is that it is vanishingly rare for a baby to get hep b unless it is during birth (from the mother). And we test pregnant women for hep b, so we already know which babies are at risk. Combining the pool of babies born to mothers with and without hep b for determining risk factors is pretty dishonest. It is done to pad the revenues of large pharma companies. There is a non-zero increase in risk from getting any medicine. We weigh those risks against what the medicine is for. For babies born to mothers without hep b, the best choice is to not vax, for less lucky babies its in the vax category. Ignoring this doesn't improve outcomes. Risk is just complex.
• B-Con 1y ago
  Bruce Schneier said something (multiple times in his books, blog, etc) that really stuck with me as a young adult. Basically: If something is in the news, it's rare enough that you don't have to worry about it. Once the news stops reporting on it, that's when you worry.
• thaw13579 1y ago
  It would be great to have a similar analysis for elementary school-aged children. Many schools are using "crisis simulation" of active shooter events in an effort to prepare for them (and presumably reduce the risk of death). While good natured, I think it's ultimately just needlessly traumatizing children, since school shootings account for <0.1% of deaths. While school shootings are devastating and sadly on the rise, the media greatly exaggerates the risks in people's minds. By the numbers, the biggest mortality risks for children are drowning and automobile injuries while unbuckled, both of which can be trained without inflicting psychological harm.
  • antonymoose 1y ago
    How are they training your children? For mine, it’s basically just “teacher gives a signal, barricade a door, hide in a strongpoint.” I can’t say it’s anymore serious or traumatizing than earthquake, fire, or tornado drills I grew up on.
    • thaw13579 1y ago
      A summary from the Everytown report "The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schools" "Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill. " https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-shooter-drills-in-schools https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
      • antonymoose 1y ago
        This is a very unreliable report from an anti-firearms activist group. Hardly a neutral source to be believed.
        • 1y ago
• russellbeattie 1y ago
  Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered how many actual homicides there are in the UK every year. Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700). Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film. It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed. This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception. What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.
  • hunterpayne 1y ago
    Counterpoint...there were more than 53,000 stabbings in the UK in the same period. I couldn't even find the same stat for the US. When someone wants to be violent, pretty much any heavy or sharp object will do, making things illegal doesn't really change the total amount of violence. You do get less homicides, but more people with life changing injuries. If it wasn't for the UK locking thousands of people up for Facebook memes, this would probably be a convincing argument. Ironic considering Starmer is a human rights lawyer by trade.
    • vel0city 1y ago
      From the statistics I've seen, the US has a higher stabbing homicides per capita than the UK. Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting. How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
• rupellohn 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
  • programmarchy 1y ago
    Exactly what came to mind for me as well. Information is a difference that makes a difference.
• musha68k 1y ago
  Aside from cryptographically sound and open source end to end verifiable options there is one simple alternative still used in many other countries and jurisdictions: 1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..
  • ynx0 1y ago
    wrong thread
    • musha68k 1y ago
      thanks %
• polishdude20 1y ago
  "When asked what emotions the news generates, “informed” was the most common response." A pet peeve of mine is the fact that any word can now be an emotion. "Informed" is not an emotion. It's is a state you reach on your way to a base emotion that is dictated by what you've just been informed about.
• thelastgallon 1y ago
  The article misses the most important point. Its not just the numbers, but whats preventable/actionable vs whats not. One of the easiest things (and the #1 cause) that we can work on is automobile accidents: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22, and the second most common cause for ages 23–67 Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable. Sure, we can do lifestyle changes, but eventually old people have to die of something and its in one of those buckets anyways.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • 3abiton 1y ago
    Pretty much this, and to add what does not impact our rights. Take freedom of speech for example, self sensoring can lead to a safer albeit "less fulfilling" life, compares to a one where you dissent against the government (saudi arabia, turkey, etc ...)
  • thelastgallon 1y ago
    Dumb Ways to Die, so many dumb ways to die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or driving drunk!
  • rufus_foreman 1y ago
    >> Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable "Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x 600,000 people die of cancer per year, 40,000 people die in automobile accidents. Focusing on 40,000 automobile accidents to the exclusion of focusing on 300,000 preventable cancer deaths does not math.
  • hashstring 1y ago
    Hm, but to news readers, how actionable are terrorism-related deaths really? I would say less than heart disease related ones. To policy makers, well, terrorism is actionable but so is diabetes. And that while diabetes accounts for a far larger number of deaths. So I think there is real asymmetry if we look at the data from an “actionable” perspective.
• Stevvo 1y ago
  Surprised to see such large numbers for COVID-19. In EU countries, where most everyone is triple vaxxed, deaths from COVID-19 are less than 0.1%. In US the number is larger than drug overdoses. Over 100k preventable deaths a year attributable to anti-vaccine hysteria/conspiracy theories.
  • hunterpayne 1y ago
    I'm not sure the word 'preventable' belongs in that sentence. Odds are, if COVID-19 gets you, in the absence of COVID-19 some other cold or flu will get you instead (or in the near future). That's very different from an accident where the outcomes are 40+ years of life apart in many cases. That's why gross deaths aren't a great measure. Lost expected years of life remaining is much better. Its why we morn the loss of a child so much more than a grandparent.
  • autoexec 1y ago
    It was very recently one of the top causes of death in the country. The number of deaths are also being under-reported so we're even worse off than the numbers would suggest. That's why I can't really blame the news for talking about it more than causes of death we can't really control for.
• simonjgreen 1y ago
  I’m surprised at 1 in 50 deaths being suicide
• IndrekR 1y ago
  Funny thing is, that news, by definition, are written about things that are newsworthy. Newsworthy things are not common, but exceptional and rare. Thus one shall not worry too much about the news as those things practically never happen in everyday life.
• umvi 1y ago
  Even "29% heart disease" can be misleading since it could be a 3rd or 4th order death. A big chunk of "heart disease" is likely: Standard American Diet (high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, high processed) -> high visceral fat deposits -> Type 2 diabetes -> tissue glycation -> heart disease
• AaronAPU 1y ago
  News and media in general are about anomalies because that is what draws attention. It’s news because it’s “new” in that sense. It would be interesting to have a form of media which attempts to report on reality in direct proportion to occurrences instead, but it wouldn’t draw attention so very few would use it.
• drmath 1y ago
  I wish almost every news article came with a statistics section. If you must, go ahead and write that article about a particular murder or traffic accident or drug trial or earthquake. But if you don't include statistics on similar events over time, geography, demographics, etc, you're misleading more than informing. I'd _like_ to blame the reader -- inferring anything about how common something is based on how often it's reported is unreasonable. But readers do make that inference, and writers shouldn't pretend they don't know it. And for most of us nowadays it's not about articles and writers. It's about eight-second video clips on TikTok and creators. So I don't have any hope that we'll become better informed.
• HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  Well, yeah. TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. All their programming, news included, is designed to attract eyeballs, hence money, and sadly sensationalist and titillating stories is what most people want to see.
  • mmanfrin 1y ago
    And the only institution with a mandate to educate and inform just got defunded.
    • rammer 1y ago
      ... And why did they get defunded?
      • Braxton1980 1y ago
        As a lesson to other government funded entities about the power of government and to please voters who are easily manipulated with mere accusations that align with long held unproven beliefs
      • intended 1y ago
        Because the media sold a story to one set of the population - the topic of this thread.
  • subless 1y ago
    It's like my journalism professor told me since he used to be a news anchor ... "If it bleeds, it leads".
  • MountDoom 1y ago
    > TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. Inform about what? Would you tune in to hear a daily report about how many old people people died of cardiac issues today? I doubt the breakdown here is different for NPR. Or BBC, or whatnot. It's not a failure of capitalism, it's just what we crave.
• j_timberlake 1y ago
  I'm surprised how low suicide rates are at 2%. If I were an old sick person and steadily becoming more of a burden, there's no way in hell I would just leave it to nature to decide when I die, or let the profit-maximizing hospital bureaucracy make that call for me. I'm sure some old folk are afraid that suicide will send them to hell, as if God wouldn't understand.
  • skeuomorphism 1y ago
    We all say this when we don't have to cross this bridge yet. I hope you're as strong as you say you are when that day comes, I'm rooting for you
  • AstroBen 1y ago
    Easy to say when you're not yet the old sick person
    • j_timberlake 1y ago
      Yes it is, it's called planning-ahead for the extremely predictable.
      • some_guy_nobel 1y ago
        Sure thing. "When I’m 33, I’ll quit – I don’t want to be a rock star all my life.” - Mick Jagger Also, I've never seen a hypen used in 'planning ahead' before.
        • lovich 1y ago
          There are quite a lot of hyphens in this younger than open access to LLM models account’s posts.
          • j_timberlake 1y ago
            "Too many hyphens!" is definitely the dumbest insult I've ever seen for someone digging through a comment history, holy shit.
• mikpanko 1y ago
  Beyond the common narrative on this topic, a factor to consider is that people might be more interested in hearing about death causes, which are not considered their own “fault”. These situations are less “fair”. Thus terrorism, homicide and accidents get a big focus.
• prats226 1y ago
  Would be intersting to see where funding goes to fix these issues. News would heavily impact public opinion and hence political influence and public funding.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• wonderwonder 1y ago
  Media is simply the attempt to capture your life minutes and exchange them for advertising dollars.
• stared 1y ago
  Sure, media reporting is biased towards things that are sensationalist. At the same time, total death factors are not that interesting. Everyone of us will die one day, and it might be assigned to various organs failing first. What matters more is causes of death as a function of age: https://flowingdata.com/mortality/ https://flowingdata.com/mortality/
  • boringg 1y ago
    That and I suspect death where which is random and shocking is much more concerning then deaths that are maybe attributable to semi controllable lifestyle factors.
    • toss1 1y ago
      >> random and shocking is much more concerning For sure, urprising, notable, and scary. But it seems especially for random causes that we can not control, why should we worry about those? In contrast, death causes which are semi-fully controllable should concern us greatly. E.g., just don't smoke is a virtual guarantee of extra 5-20 healthy years (and a greater difference if you're in the ~1/3 having the genetic makeup susceptible to cancer from smoking). Seems we should be very concerned and work hard to avoid smoking, vs random death from a helicopter falling on us?
      • dhussoe 1y ago
        > Seems we should be very concerned and work hard to avoid smoking, vs random death from a helicopter falling on us? At a population level maybe... but if you (and your family/friends if you want to consider that too) already don't smoke, there is not much to do? I don't have to work hard to avoid smoking because I am not interested in doing it to begin with, and it is not like cigarettes jump out of bushes and ambush you. Helicopter crashes aren't common, but traffic violence is mostly treated as normal in the US, and deaths are often brushed off as an unavoidable "accident" with little or no punishment for the perpetrator, or serious consideration of systematically redesigning streets or vehicles to make these deaths less likely. This is something that I cannot "simply" avoid like smoking is.
• standardUser 1y ago
  As a thought experiment this is great, but I don't think mortality is the best example. Sure, reporting on gun deaths can be written off as sensationalism, but gun deaths in the US are a stark contrast to most other wealthy societies, which makes it newsworthy. And though I do want to be informed about leading causes of death for the elderly (since I hope to be one someday), I'm much more interested in things that are killing people prematurely, suddenly or unexpectedly.
• joegibbs 1y ago
  For one, like the article says, there’s the fact that it’s not really news: you could print "BREAKING: 5,000 nonagenarians DEAD from heart disease and cancer" every day since people started living that long. It’s a shock when a young person dies of something unexpected like murder. Terrorism is even worse because there’s the perception that murder is mostly something that happens to gangsters and drug dealers while terrorism could happen to the average suburbanite minding their own business. But also terrorism has more potential - say if they got their hands on a dirty bomb or released a viral pathogen - and that’s more terrifying to people as well. It’s the same with nuclear energy: on average coal kills a lot more, but in an absolute worst case scenario nuclear would overtake the total coal death toll.
  • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    Reporting terrorism also benefits people who want to pass laws restricting peoples freedom or increasing powers of the state.
• kweinber 1y ago
  Heart disease is grossly overrepresented because the default cause of death is “cardiac arrest”. This is because that the definition of death is heart stoppage in most states. So if a doc doesn’t know the actual cause, that’s what they write down.
• munificent 1y ago
  The most common way to die is, by definition, not news.
• hamasho 1y ago
  I wonder how many of the cancer and heart disease reports are just about famous people who happened to die from those causes, rather than educational or awareness articles.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• narrator 1y ago
  They left out the third leading cause of death which is medical errors. Going to hospitals can be bad for your health. https://baltimoretimes-online.com/news/2024/05/10/johns-hopkins-study-points-to-medical-errors-as-americas-third-leading-cause-of-death/ https://baltimoretimes-online.com/news/2024/05/10/johns-hopk...
• ottah 1y ago
  Huh, all this discussion justifying the relevancy and utility, and not a single ask, but why these shocking things and not other shocking things? It's propaganda of course. Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch don't own news outlets because they think journalism is neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  I do wonder where those few 16 terrorist deaths occurred. Several have made the news as Palestinians with American citizenship that died in occupied territories.
  • shafiemoji 1y ago
    Are there actually only 16 deaths caused by terrorists? Don't they have mass shootings every week?
    • austin-cheney 1y ago
      They don’t appear to count mass shootings as terrorism and even still if there were one occurring every day the numbers would still be comparatively small.
• muzani 1y ago
  My theory is media is biased towards anything that can result in political change. Shark attacks and lightning strikes are dramatic but they don't seem to bias as much. Rare diseases have the potential to be sensationalist too. Terrorism almost never makes the news where I live; the closest is assassinations, especially linked to political figures. If there was a movement against some sugar tycoon, I bet diabetes deaths would suddenly top the news. I'd be interested in how often Tesla accidents are covered by the news.
  • CMCDragonkai 1y ago
    Media has the follow the money, and for as long as media is paid by advertising, then they have to report on stuff that gets the most salience even if it's proportionally irrelevant.
    • muzani 1y ago
      Cosmetics, fashion, and finance pays well in terms of ads, but that has little to do with homicide and terrorism. There's plenty of other forms of fearmongering like CO poisoning and snake bites. Media tends to be paid by politics too. Here, nearly every major newspaper has been bought out by political parties. We're seeing the same with digital media, like with Twitter and TikTok recently. It's an efficient way to convert money into social power.
• jal278 1y ago
  The function of news is to help a democratic citizenry be critically informed, and that this kind of statistic doesn't accomplish what it set out to do, although it's certainly interesting for its own sake. I think it's a challenge of our age to figure out how to create institutions that are wise and don't simply bend to distorting pressures (money, politics, psychology). For example, we do want terrorism over-represented relative to old-age-deaths. However, a responsible and self-aware media would really attempt to counteract 'availability bias' -- e.g. that due to the human mind what is repeated we tend to assume is actually more prevalent. But we don't have wise institutions at the moment. The more general problem is that it is hard to quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which media fails at fulfilling its complex societal role, because it is a qualitative failure in general, although we can poke at it's edges for sure (e.g. fearmongering language probably has gone up, as has polarization on both sides of the aisle, and the amount of information-free 'babbling and speculating' in the immediate aftermath of some event has likely gone up over time).
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• wagwang 1y ago
  What a dumb article, diseases are self-inflicted/random, no one cares.
• chaseadam17 1y ago
  I stopped reading all news except for a daily non partisan newsletter and it has made me much happier. One criticism I often get is that I’m not fulfilling my duty of being an informed citizen - but people forget that the benefit of being informed is to improve your or someone else’s life. If the news is wasting your time and draining your energy more than it’s giving you actionable insights you can do something tangible about, it’s not worth reading. Of course, maybe you just enjoy the news, but then it’s entertainment (and not a civic duty). I think this idea of being an informed citizen is carried over from prior eras when news was scarce, sort of like how my grandma used to get mad at me if I didn’t finish my McNuggets in the 90’s, not realizing “chicken” could be unhealthy since meat had always been such a scarce luxury in her life.
• BobbyTables2 1y ago
  I’d think many people dying of heart disease and cancer are at the end of a long life and perhaps not entirely surprising. Sure there are tragic exceptions… However, about 1000 people a week die in car accidents which almost never makes the news. I doubt the majority of those are either elderly or non-preventable. I feel this should get attention but never does.
  • hunter-gatherer 1y ago
    I'm sure someone has done the math, so I'd be intrigued if anyone can point it out. I'm curious as to the ratio of traffic deaths to driving hours is? It would be even more interesting to see if we had numbers for deaths against "productive" and "leisure" driving hours. Like, we all see the occasional accident, but drive on... So I am not sure the media _needs_ to bring attention to it. As a society, have we just come to accept some deaths as a cost of doing business??? I dunno... just speculating.
• mystralBorne17 1y ago
  The news shows us what's unusual, not what's most dangerous to us.
• ruszki 1y ago
  In other words: terrorism works. The incentives are there on every level: people read it, media wants attention, terrorists want distorted news. I cannot see any other solution to this just legislation, and a very-very-very careful one. I’m not even sure that it’s possible in the current situation without harm.
• CalRobert 1y ago
  Every time I try to tell people we didn't want to live in a dangerous suburb because drivers kill kids people think I'm crazy. But drivers are the leading killers of young children, so much so that we rightfully to teach our kids to be scared of drivers and stay away from them from toddlerhood. I wish we treated this like the outright emergency it is.
• coldtea 1y ago
  > Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage. Other chronic issues, such as strokes, respiratory problems, diabetes, and kidney and liver disease, were also very underrepresented in the news. Almost everybody will eventually die from one of this laundry list of items if they get old enough, regardless of where they live. And regarding reporting, how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"? Or are you supposed to cover every heart attack on a news story? Whereas murders and school shootings and such, can each have their own, big or small story. At worst, the US has like 2x the obesity rate (and related deaths) compared to a place like Germany or France. But there's hardly any scarcity of news reports around health issues like obesity, or cancer either. Health coverage, health scares, health influencing, health fads, health supplements, diets, etc, are a trillion dollar industry. Not all countries have such big homicide rates - most western countries have like 1/5th or less. And in most western countries a "school shooting" is nothing a person should even have to think or plan about, and schools don't ever need metal detectors, or to have to plan around such things.
  • majirdulb 1y ago
    Otherwise agree, but >And in most western countries a "school shooting" is nothing a person should even have to think or plan about, and schools don't ever need metal detectors, or to have to plan around such things. School shootings are still very much a thing where I live (finland), last one being just last year. A country with no guns and supposed to be one of the happiest in the world still experiences them
    • showsover 1y ago
      The one before that was in 2008, so a good 16 years between the two. I.e. not something people ever have to think about.
      • jojobas 1y ago
        All "active shootings" (mostly not school shootings) in the US kill only about twice as many people per year as lightning strikes. Pretty sure not many people think about those.
• 2b3a51 1y ago
  I'm looking at the bar chart 'causes of death in 2023' and seeing 7.8% classified as accidents. In the UK the figure appears to be much lower if I have understood the ONS report correctly (link to spreadsheet top right). I'm wondering at the disparity and where it comes from. Real or an artifact of definitions in use when certifying deaths? https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/accidentdeathsintheuk2019to2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre... (scroll down in the spreadsheet for the figures for all people in England and Wales, the first table is non-residents only)
  • nikanj 1y ago
    The average American adult travels more than 40 miles per day https://www.replicahq.com/post/the-average-american-adult-travels-more-than-40-miles-per-day-in-2023-see-how-residents-in-your-county-rank https://www.replicahq.com/post/the-average-american-adult-tr... In the UK, an average car travels 19 miles per day https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car-mileage-uk https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car... Traffic accidents dominate the fatal accidents category
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    The UK has 2.6 road deaths per 100k people per year. The US has 14.2. The discrepancy is probably mostly driven by this (though the US does also have far lower workplace safety standards). Part of this is that Americans drive far greater distances, but even adjusted for distance, the US has about twice the deaths per km.
    • fransje26 1y ago
      For posterity: - The UK had an estimated death rate of 4.7 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled in 2024 [1] - The US had an estimated 12.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled in 2023 [2] [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2024/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2024 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... [2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813705 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
• Vektorceraptor 1y ago
  [flagged]
• ceving 1y ago
  According to Shannon, the measure of the information content of a news story is the improbability with which the event occurs. This means that rare events automatically have a higher information content than frequently occurring events. Even though I generally don't think much of the media, one has to acknowledge that in this case the media should focus more on rarer events.
• throw-10-13 1y ago
  Americans are conditioned to fear everything and everyone around them except Big Macs.
• socalgal2 1y ago
  I think I'd prefer to see it broken down by neighborhood. Maybe crime all over is down but it's up in the tenderloin, compton, oakland. I see what I consider, I guess spin, on reports on oakland. Like: * Violent crime rose between 2018 and 2023, though it was lower than the peak in 1992. What does it matter if it was worse in 1992? To the people leaving in Oakland say from 2010 to 2023, it's going up. They don't care if it was worse in 1992. That's irrelevant data to try to make you feel better about the fact that things are getting worse. They care that they are less safe than before. There's a buncn more but the point is, it's possible crime all over is down and crime in places many people live is up.
  • austin-cheney 1y ago
    The point is that crime can be up by a factor of 10x and it’s still not significant compared to cancer and heart disease.
    • socalgal2 1y ago
      I don't accept that point. I don't care about cancer and heart disease as those are mostly, to some degree, my responsibility. Excersize, eat well, don't smoke. That message is well known and common so it's not news. It's just common sense at this point, even if plenty of people choose to enjoy junk food and smoking for a shorter life. On the other and, there's not much I can do about crime and it massively affects my day-to-day life, far more than cancer and heart disease. It determines where I want to live, what activitives I'm willing to do, where I can hangout safely, what precautions I have to take, etc...
  • gblargg 1y ago
    And by age. Basically, get some data narrowed down to people in the same group as you, rather than a mix of everyone.
    • gadders 1y ago
      Ethnicity would have a dramatic impact on the results as well.
• jogu 1y ago
  It's quite interesting to see this data, but I can't help but think that there's some overloading of the words and a bit of a false comparison. The overrepresented categories could be seen as such when focusing on the aspect of "cause of death". But murder, terrorism, etc. as topics aren't simply that someone died but that another person caused it. A sad reality, but the news tends to highlight the criminals, not the victims.
• moebrowne 1y ago
  When people say they "want to know what is going on in the world around them", I think what is meant is that they "want to know what is going on in the world around them *that could affect them and those around them*" I, therefore, think a slightly different question would be more interesting/telling: 'What Americans who read the news reports die from vs what the news reports on' This would demonstrate any gap between informing people of things which are relevant to them vs hyperbole.
• patchtopic 1y ago
  Next in this series: why does the news not report on the time Trump spends sleeping and on the the toilet with the same importance that he spends on political decisions
• amai 1y ago
  See also These stupid trucks are literally killing us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
• amai 1y ago
  Don‘t overlook the second insight: „The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.“
  • bill_joy_fanboy 1y ago
    That's because all major media outlets in the U.S. are run by the same people.
• soueuls 1y ago
  If I was a heavy drinker and smoker I would likely have health problems and shaking hands. I don’t think I need the New York Times to inform me about it or that 88 years old are dying from heart attacks everyday. But if people starts to behead teachers (as it’s happening in my country : France) for religious reasons, I want to know. Yea, even if it represents a few deaths here and there. Because I am willing to consider the possibility that it’s telling of a shift in my society that will have consequences down the road. Significance of events are not necessarily correlated to how many people die from it. Also different countries set up different priorities. France for example is talking quite a lot about « feminicide » (how many women are killed because they are women). In France, it was 137 in 2024. Is it a lot? Probably not for a population of 70 millions. Can we significantly decrease the number? Probably not. But people and media are still talking about it. And even if this specific number do not improve, it does spark debate about related topic, which is sometimes a good thing.
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Interesting analysis but it suffers from an important flaw: everyone eventually dies from something, and in the modern age people don't die from "old age" anymore. They die from heart failure, or cancer, or pneumonia, even if they're 85 and their body has run its course. So I think you need to look at "early" deaths, since those are the ones that are in theory "preventable". I'm not sure where to draw the line in terms of age -- maybe 65? We then start to see a much clearer picture of the deaths that we actually care about, and the ones that we can potentially do something about to minimize. While it would be nice for those who are 80 to live until they are 90, I'd argue that it's much more important to help those who are 50 live until they are 80.
• danans 1y ago
  The deaths with the highest coverage (apart from suicide) are committed by people upon other people. Because they have an actor and an object, both with identities, they inherently have stories, which are the product that the news media ultimately produces. It's harder to tell a story about someone (or even many people) dying of heart disease because there is no "doer". Assuming no agenda and honest representation of known facts, this will already bias coverage. But since we know many news outlets have agendas and don't honestly represent known facts, this tendency is amplified further.
• johnnyApplePRNG 1y ago
  My best friend's father just died at 68 from Multiple Myeloma. And I just attended another friend's father's funderal who was only 65. They weren't even sure which cancer started it all as he was just riddled with it by the time he went to the hospital for "stomach pain". So I've started talking to friends recently about their weight and how excess body fat significantly contributes towards numerous cancers. It's been interesting. The last group I brought it up with steered the conversation towards "all bodies are beautiful bodies" which is true but ... GAH! ... basically the entire western world is in denial about health and diet. The corporations are fueling this fire, partly I'm sure through steering mainstream media to avoid certain talking points. How many of you here actually knew that being overweight contributes to dozens of early onset cancers? Be honest. You can't survive on alcohol, chips and cigarettes... but because people seem to be able to do that for a few decades, everybody just shrugs off health and thinks "I'll be fine".
  • afavour 1y ago
    > The corporations are fueling this fire I really don't think that's true. If anything corporations heavily push thin, fit bodies most places you look.
    • johnnyApplePRNG 1y ago
      I meant corporations like McDonalds, Costco, CocaCola, etc... pretty much any kind of addictive/sugary/fatty food manufacturer or supplier... they make mega bucks and it's in their best interest to have a nation of obese individuals.
      • CursedSilicon 1y ago
        Costco is a weird choice. They're just a bulk grocery store
        • johnnyApplePRNG 1y ago
          Is it, though? Have you ever compared the clientele who shop at Costco and your local health food store for example? Pretty much all of the food that they sell (aside from the fresh produce and flash frozen fruit/veggies) is woefully unhealthy... addictive... and in quantities that only an early 20th century Catholic family should be buying. A pack of 16 croissants, anyone? How about 32 mini croissants filled with chocolate and sugar? Fresh baked! Even the "healthy" (looking) "food" they make in their Deli is horrible for you. Everything comes out of a bag and it's all just a repackaging operation, basically. Humans are like Goldfish. Give them more food and a bigger tank and watch them grow, baby! Source: Worked for Costco.
• johnnienaked 1y ago
  This gave me deja vu about coronavirus
• muddi900 1y ago
  This kind of reporting misses one glaring issue; years of life taken away. 16 year olds rarely die of cancer or heart attacks. But they can and do die of homicide. Probability of death at 16, according to SSA[1] is 6/10,000 and the remaining life expectancy in 59 years. School shooting, gang violence, and general homicides take a lot more of life off from people than "old age" diseases. Though incidence of heart diseases going up in late youth and early adulthood. But they still don't hold a candle to homicides. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html