4 ms·
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.
by 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 agoRight 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 agoThis 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.