I'm guessing you wouldn't have heard of Li, Todd, or Radtke if they hadn't committed suicide. In other words, a person's suicide may increase their newsworthin

I'm guessing you wouldn't have heard of Li, Todd, or Radtke if they hadn't committed suicide. In other words, a person's suicide may increase their newsworthiness. With Bayes' Theorem: P(suicide | news) = P(news | suicide) P(suicide) / P(news) The statement "Suicides are more newsworthy than average events" can be mathematically stated as P(news | suicide) > P(news). Then the news media "amplifies" suicides by some factor k > 1, where k = P(news | suicide) / P(news). I don't doubt that there are a handful of suicide stories out there that are actually successfully covered murders, but I think those represent a tiny fraction of the total. I really don't think there's an assassination epidemic.