12 ms·

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

by 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.
    - Braxton1980 1y ago
      NYC is doing just that with their vision zero initiative. https://www.nyc.gov/content/visionzero/pages/ https://www.nyc.gov/content/visionzero/pages/ Reduction in the speed limit and enforcement with traffic cameras, changes in street design, etc Per the site traffic fatalities, including pedestrian, were the 2nd lowest level in recorded history for the first three months.
boringg 1y ago
Also thats a much better visualization - thanks for sharing it. Kind of fascinating in a morbid way.
Aloisius 1y ago
News reporting is biased towards what's new. If it wasn't, we'd call it olds. Reporting n more people died from heart disease every day isn't news.
- aclimatt 1y ago
  Right and not just that it's new, it's that it's noteworthy. The NYT's motto is "all the news that's fit to print". The job of a news source is to report on stories that are A) new and B) noteworthy. Sure they're sensationalist to gather more clicks. But even if they weren't, this skew wouldn't change. I get what the article is trying to say, and they did call this out, but it's still a bit silly to do an entire data analysis to prove that newspapers primarily report on stories that are... newsworthy.
- phs318u 1y ago
  > Reporting n more people died from heart disease every day isn't news. True. But reporting that there’s been a 50% increasing in heart disease in the 30-50yo cohort in the last 20 years probably is (or should be) notable.
  - akoboldfrying 1y ago
    This kind of thing does tend to get reported. But that one study outcome summarising many lives becomes one article (one blip, one news cycle), while every individual homicide can get its own article.
brookst 1y ago
The new isn't biased towards "sensationalist", it's biased towards unusual. There's an old saying in newsrooms: nobody cares about a dog bites man story. Everyone will read a man bites dog story.
parpfish 1y ago
now that i think about it... i think it'd be interesting if the news did a little blurb on 'demographics' along with their reports of other numbers like weather and stock prices. "this week, the county had X births and Y deaths. the median age rose slightly to Z."
- socalgal2 1y ago
  sounds like a fun project. Find sources for that data. Make an AI generated news caster tell you the results each day and post it on youtube/tiktok
godelski 1y ago
I think you're burying the lead here. An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data. So the question are "does news distort our views?" and "does news make us feel more unsafe than we actually are?". Certainly the answer to both is "yes" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-between-local-news-coverage-and-americans-perceptions-of-crime/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-... https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-crime-serious-increasing.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-c...
- quantummagic 1y ago
  People who don't watch the news are uninformed. People who watch the news are misinformed. The news lies. In many subtle and not so subtle ways; due to incompetence, bias, misguided good intentions, politics, money, and evil conspiracies.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Another typical way of expressing it: Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is. Literally. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY
- eclipticplane 1y ago
  There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that? Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges. Is that normalized in data from 20 years ago?
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    Yeah I think it would be good to cross-check all government statistics against polls from groups such as Gallup, to get a sense of what's being reported.
eslaught 1y ago
To me it's interesting that (a) most people die of old age, and (b) the leading cause of death is essentially preventable (heart disease being highly lifestyle related) or else plausibly curable in the future (I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime). That was very much not the case historically; you can Google numbers yourself but the percentage of childhood deaths prior to modern medicine was truly shocking. It also seems to indicate that, with some thought and care, a meaningful impact (both at individual and societal levels) is possible by altering our lifestyles to be healthier.
- Apes 1y ago
  I don't think there's a silver bullet coming within our lifetimes. There's no single points of failure: as you get older, everything just starts wearing out and failing. If you cure heart disease and cancer, then others will just take their place: strokes, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's disease, falls. And even if you do extend your lifespan, the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
  - david38 1y ago
    Standard engineering. You fix the thing that breaks the system first. Fix that, the next bug appears. Rinse, repeat. You don’t think we have been doing this already? Car safety improved, general violence, death by food poisoning, etc. Now we have contacts, knee replacement surgery, meniscus surgery, widespread information on fitness for the elderly, etc. You have many specialized fields slowly improving. The top focus changes as the previous top problems get solutions.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      In general the problem is that when humans enter well into senescence, at some point your body just stops working altogether and it's at that point that basically anything that happens to you next will kill you. Or sometimes it will be nothing at all, and your heart will simply stop in your sleep one night. This is why when somebody dies 'of old age' it's often not like you can just seem them slowly drifting away day by day. Rather they seem to be in perfectly good health, for their age at least, and then 2 weeks later, they're dead.
Frieren 1y ago
> total death factors are not that interesting And this is why people die from very preventable diseases. News have a social duty to inform the public, when that part is removed all that is left is sensationalist and partisan pieces. And the pubic takes bad decision in their lives based on anecdotal data. > Everyone of us will die one day To have so many overweight 40-somethings with sedentary lives is treating live as having no value. People will die some day, but they should be able to enjoy the time that they are alive. Asking people to give up a healthy live because "they will die some time" is just helping big corporations that milk people out of their lives with fatty food, stressful working environments, polluted air, etc. Do not give up, live is worth living and getting people the information to live good lives is very important.
- bruce511 1y ago
  Yes we all die. Yes a lot of those deaths could be delayed. However I'd argue that it's not as simple as "blaming the news". Health education starts as children, and continues throughout life. Secondly, focusing on just the 2 primary causes for a moment (heart disease and cancer), its not like there's a shortage of education. People (for the most part) completely understand the issues around these. Smoking is bad. Drinking is bad. Exercise is good. Eat less sugar. Eating home prepared (real) food is better than industrial food. In other words the outcomes of bad choices are well understood and very well passed on via education. And information today has never been more accessible. I don't think the news adding a running count of cancer deaths would make the slightest difference. As evidence I introduce Covid, where we did literally have a death count every day. And not some "20 years from now" result, but the "got sick on Monday, dead today" count. Population responses in different countries was diverse. In the US the partisan resistance was notable. The death count there also notable. Culturally (some) US citizens are distrustful of education. Most are in the "my personal freedom" camp. Telling someone that smoking kills triggers the "I'm free to do what I want" response. I agree people could improve their own lives easily. They already known how. They (mostly) choose not to do so.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > News have a social duty to inform the public News is an incredibly bad vehicle for anything involving public responsibility. News platformed Andrew Wakefield.
gblargg 1y ago
Factors you have control over would be more useful to focus on than inevitable things. I could excuse the media if it focused on things with useful advice on how to reduce your risk in that area.

by stared 1y ago

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.
  - Braxton1980 1y ago
    NYC is doing just that with their vision zero initiative. https://www.nyc.gov/content/visionzero/pages/ https://www.nyc.gov/content/visionzero/pages/ Reduction in the speed limit and enforcement with traffic cameras, changes in street design, etc Per the site traffic fatalities, including pedestrian, were the 2nd lowest level in recorded history for the first three months.

boringg 1y ago

Also thats a much better visualization - thanks for sharing it. Kind of fascinating in a morbid way.

Aloisius 1y ago

News reporting is biased towards what's new. If it wasn't, we'd call it olds. Reporting n more people died from heart disease every day isn't news.

aclimatt 1y ago
Right and not just that it's new, it's that it's noteworthy. The NYT's motto is "all the news that's fit to print". The job of a news source is to report on stories that are A) new and B) noteworthy. Sure they're sensationalist to gather more clicks. But even if they weren't, this skew wouldn't change. I get what the article is trying to say, and they did call this out, but it's still a bit silly to do an entire data analysis to prove that newspapers primarily report on stories that are... newsworthy.
phs318u 1y ago
> Reporting n more people died from heart disease every day isn't news. True. But reporting that there’s been a 50% increasing in heart disease in the 30-50yo cohort in the last 20 years probably is (or should be) notable.
- akoboldfrying 1y ago
  This kind of thing does tend to get reported. But that one study outcome summarising many lives becomes one article (one blip, one news cycle), while every individual homicide can get its own article.

brookst 1y ago

The new isn't biased towards "sensationalist", it's biased towards unusual. There's an old saying in newsrooms: nobody cares about a dog bites man story. Everyone will read a man bites dog story.

parpfish 1y ago

now that i think about it... i think it'd be interesting if the news did a little blurb on 'demographics' along with their reports of other numbers like weather and stock prices. "this week, the county had X births and Y deaths. the median age rose slightly to Z."

socalgal2 1y ago
sounds like a fun project. Find sources for that data. Make an AI generated news caster tell you the results each day and post it on youtube/tiktok

godelski 1y ago

I think you're burying the lead here. An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data. So the question are "does news distort our views?" and "does news make us feel more unsafe than we actually are?". Certainly the answer to both is "yes" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-between-local-news-coverage-and-americans-perceptions-of-crime/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-... https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-crime-serious-increasing.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-c...

quantummagic 1y ago
People who don't watch the news are uninformed. People who watch the news are misinformed. The news lies. In many subtle and not so subtle ways; due to incompetence, bias, misguided good intentions, politics, money, and evil conspiracies.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Another typical way of expressing it: Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is. Literally. [1] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_5Zgms5EY
eclipticplane 1y ago
There is massive under-reporting of violent crime across many decades. How can we evaluate that? Just in my household alone, we've been victim of 4 assault+ attacks in the past 5 years. Two resulted in arrests, zero resulted in charges. Is that normalized in data from 20 years ago?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  Yeah I think it would be good to cross-check all government statistics against polls from groups such as Gallup, to get a sense of what's being reported.

eslaught 1y ago

To me it's interesting that (a) most people die of old age, and (b) the leading cause of death is essentially preventable (heart disease being highly lifestyle related) or else plausibly curable in the future (I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime). That was very much not the case historically; you can Google numbers yourself but the percentage of childhood deaths prior to modern medicine was truly shocking. It also seems to indicate that, with some thought and care, a meaningful impact (both at individual and societal levels) is possible by altering our lifestyles to be healthier.

Apes 1y ago
I don't think there's a silver bullet coming within our lifetimes. There's no single points of failure: as you get older, everything just starts wearing out and failing. If you cure heart disease and cancer, then others will just take their place: strokes, respiratory disease, Alzheimer's disease, falls. And even if you do extend your lifespan, the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
- david38 1y ago
  Standard engineering. You fix the thing that breaks the system first. Fix that, the next bug appears. Rinse, repeat. You don’t think we have been doing this already? Car safety improved, general violence, death by food poisoning, etc. Now we have contacts, knee replacement surgery, meniscus surgery, widespread information on fitness for the elderly, etc. You have many specialized fields slowly improving. The top focus changes as the previous top problems get solutions.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    In general the problem is that when humans enter well into senescence, at some point your body just stops working altogether and it's at that point that basically anything that happens to you next will kill you. Or sometimes it will be nothing at all, and your heart will simply stop in your sleep one night. This is why when somebody dies 'of old age' it's often not like you can just seem them slowly drifting away day by day. Rather they seem to be in perfectly good health, for their age at least, and then 2 weeks later, they're dead.

Frieren 1y ago

> total death factors are not that interesting And this is why people die from very preventable diseases. News have a social duty to inform the public, when that part is removed all that is left is sensationalist and partisan pieces. And the pubic takes bad decision in their lives based on anecdotal data. > Everyone of us will die one day To have so many overweight 40-somethings with sedentary lives is treating live as having no value. People will die some day, but they should be able to enjoy the time that they are alive. Asking people to give up a healthy live because "they will die some time" is just helping big corporations that milk people out of their lives with fatty food, stressful working environments, polluted air, etc. Do not give up, live is worth living and getting people the information to live good lives is very important.

bruce511 1y ago
Yes we all die. Yes a lot of those deaths could be delayed. However I'd argue that it's not as simple as "blaming the news". Health education starts as children, and continues throughout life. Secondly, focusing on just the 2 primary causes for a moment (heart disease and cancer), its not like there's a shortage of education. People (for the most part) completely understand the issues around these. Smoking is bad. Drinking is bad. Exercise is good. Eat less sugar. Eating home prepared (real) food is better than industrial food. In other words the outcomes of bad choices are well understood and very well passed on via education. And information today has never been more accessible. I don't think the news adding a running count of cancer deaths would make the slightest difference. As evidence I introduce Covid, where we did literally have a death count every day. And not some "20 years from now" result, but the "got sick on Monday, dead today" count. Population responses in different countries was diverse. In the US the partisan resistance was notable. The death count there also notable. Culturally (some) US citizens are distrustful of education. Most are in the "my personal freedom" camp. Telling someone that smoking kills triggers the "I'm free to do what I want" response. I agree people could improve their own lives easily. They already known how. They (mostly) choose not to do so.
pjc50 1y ago
> News have a social duty to inform the public News is an incredibly bad vehicle for anything involving public responsibility. News platformed Andrew Wakefield.

gblargg 1y ago

Factors you have control over would be more useful to focus on than inevitable things. I could excuse the media if it focused on things with useful advice on how to reduce your risk in that area.