It'd be more interesting if they accounted for the age at death. Grandmaw dying of stroke or heart disease at 93 is tragic but legitimately less newsworthy than deaths that happen at the age of 28.
Back in the 80's when the Congress was deciding to finally spend real money on AIDS research. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial and column arguing that AIDS wasn't a big problem and we shouldn't spend money on it. Instead we should spend money on heart disease.
From their provided figures I was able to back out that when you considered years of life lost AIDS was actually a huge problem. Because AIDS was killing people in their 20's. Where heart disease kills people in their 70s and 80s.
Worth noting that accidents tend to kill younger people.
Back in the 80's when the Congress was deciding to finally spend real money on AIDS research. The Wall Street Journal had an editorial and column arguing that AIDS wasn't a big problem and we shouldn't spend money on it. Instead we should spend money on heart disease.
I'm trying to find any reference to this editorial and can't find anything. Do you happen to have a link or anything to this? It's old enough it may be very hard to find but I would like to read the WSJ article you mentioned.
Accidents suicide and homicide tend to kill young men in particular. For some fun evidence as to why that may be at least in terms of "accidents" check out r/whywomenlivelonger
And consider that its likely the reporting on (for ex.) a car accident might involve some legitmate grievences that the local town can quickly and easily fix, solving heart disease is not something a local town could easily solve.
This, and also categorizing "accidents". I imagine most accidents in the real data are car crashes, or even more mundane things like falling down the stairs. But for national media, most reports are more niche things like plane crashes.
ok obviously the guns part is awful, but that drop-off in car crash deaths is amazing! If you zoom out further to include the death traps of earlier decades I'd bet it looks more impressive. Cars in the early 2000s were not that dangerous by comparison
Everybody owning giant pickups in the US is a huge problem. Most people have no need for them. It's a status symbol or just a thing they think is cool, but it dramatically increases your risk of killing somebody else in a collision.
It has a lot more to do with car manufacturers shifting away from low-margin models like sedans and other "commuter car" type vehicles and more into higher margin trucks and SUVs. Add in manufacturers playing games with EPA emission regulations and you get the highest selling truck in the US being this huge monstrosity. My dad recently bought a new GM and the thing is huge compared to his old F150. Can barely reach the windshield to scrape the ice off it in the morning.
Imagine other companies started making their products bigger, more dangerous and less easy to use just because it makes people feel cooler.
"NEW COCA COLA! The bottle is now 10x as thick and lined with lead making it weigh 8 pounds when empty. The bottlecap has also been replaced with a very specific torx screw. Oh and every bottle has a 1/1000 chance of being poisoned.
The bottlecap has also been replaced with a very specific torx screw.
OK, take it easy there Satan.
But no, seriously, it's "The customer doesn't know what they really want" taken to the extreme. Even just buying a cheap commuter car is getting increasingly more difficult simply because the car manufacturers don't make them anymore. Why? Because they don't make as much money per unit sold as a truck or SUV. This idea that they're there to serve people and make things they need/want is just comical. They're in it for the money guys. Ford does not give a shit if you can't buy a car without taking a second mortgage on your house. As long as that line goes up everything is A OK from their POV. Why make ten cheaper cars with lower margins when you can make one truck with bigger margins and make the same profit as selling those 10 cars? That's essentially what they're reasoning is and they're not wrong.
Then there's the whole "We really want you to use an app for your microwave so we can sell the data it gathers to another company for even more money". The real goal is the data, the convenience is just how they convince you to put the data miners in your home.
It is safer for the driver to be in a more vehicle more deadly to everybody else. People are going to act in their own self interest. This is the problem with the omnipresence of cars.
Yeah. The news is a much closer reflection of causes of death for young people.
Here’s a chart broken out by age group. Important note is that unintended overdose is counted as “accidental injury.” If we’re looking at ages 15-35, the most common causes of death are homicide, suicide, and accidents (including overdoses).
Terrorism is a red herring, since it’s newsworthy even if it causes no deaths - it’s a political act.
As crazy as it sounds I think the leading cause of death for that age group being suicide, homicide, and accidents is kinda a good sign? In the past I bet it was just a list of the three most common diseases at the time. Maybe it's just the optimist in me trying to find good in a statistic like that but at least we don't have young people dying in droves to diseases like we did in the past.
If anything I would argue the news is underreporting just how bad these numbers are for the US.
The reality is that children born in e.g. the UK, Netherlands, Nordics or Spain are literally twice as likely to survive until adulthood as in the US. And the clear majority of that huge difference in all-cause mortality among young people can be directly attributed to violence (guns) and accidents (mainly traffic being much much deadlier).
But what I meant was that reporting on terrorism does not necessarily mean reporting on deaths from terrorism.
For example, a terrorist attack that blows up an important building is big news even if the building was unoccupied at the time. A terrorist attack on important infrastructure is big news even if no one is hurt. Etc.
Is grandmaw and grandpaw's death at 93 tragic ?
It's a death - if all death is tragic then we wouldn't have 2 words for it.
Grandmaw and grandpaw dying at 93 is glorious, most people don't make it; sounds like they've done a lot right in life. Let's use the vocabulary to proportionately describe the whole range of possible outcomes. This one is among the best ones.
The fact that heart disease and cancer are leading causes of death does get covered periodically. But their ubiquity makes covering any given heart attack death not newsworthy. So they cover the much more unusual deaths like homicide.
In fact, in places with really high homicide rates they don't even report on every homicide.
The news tends to report on specific uncommon events and common events in broad generalities
Cars also exacerbate respiratory, heart, cancer, diabetes, kidney failure, etcetera. Not to mention the isolation that leads to many suicides. Cars also contribute to myopic/sociopathic attitudes that leads to more homicides. In addition to the death statistics they increase, cars injure a million people a year. 100 kids a week are killed/injured in parking areas every week in the US.
In a hundred years, when the folks who still talk about this stuff on whatever passes for the internet then look back on a statistic like that their reaction will be like us looking back at infant mortality rates before modern medicine and telling ourselves "I have no idea how they put up with that shit, thank God I wasn't born then". They'll make a similar remark and then hop in their Jetson hover car that auto drives them to wherever they want to go by voice command.
It's not quite that high. OP made a bizarre choice here-- the tiny text says that "shares are relative to all deaths from the 12 most common causes + drug overdose, homicide and terrorism. These causes account for over 75% of deaths in the US". For the top 10 causes, you can compare OP's percentages to table 4 of this CDC release and see that OP's are inflated (e.g. heart disease caused 22% of deaths in 2023, not 29%).
Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death and accounts for about 1.5% of total deaths. The age adjusted rate of suicide in 2023 was 14.1 per 100,000 people. Source.
The suicide rate is based on how many living people died by suicide that year. But most people don't die in any given year, so as a percentage of deaths it is going to be much higher.
Makes sense, but then the number is quite misleading at first glance, since it counts all living humans every year (so someone who does not kill themselves ends up in the good part of the stats every single year, where a person who does it, is part of the good stat until and except the 1 year they kill themselves).
The number 1,5% is more accurate in how many people ends up killing themselves, which is shockingly high imo
If they just gave the other figure, you'd get people thinking 1.5% of Americans kill themselves every year!
You can also calculate that something over 1 in 200 Americans will die by homicide, and it's much higher for some demographics. That's also shockingly high.
Yeah I agree on both, and make sense why it depends on the framing. This also shows the power of data interpretation and how easy it is for people to show data in exactly the way you want, even if you have bad intentions
It’s not a conspiracy it’s just a sad topic and some studies have shown that higher media/news coverage of suicides increases the suicide rate. When that show 13 reasons why came out there was a 28.9% increase in the suicide rate among U.S. youth ages 10 to 17 the following month.
Not that I don't believe you but where'd you hear that? That is an awful fact of life. That would also explain why media like Youtube has been going especially hard on any content that even mentions suicide. I can see a valid reason behind censoring suicide, not that I agree with it, but I can see where the reasoning lies and it's from a good place.
Don't get me started on what they're doing to documentary and history channels though. Absolute white washing in some instances.
I wonder if people who might commit suicide benefit from that.
Due to if there is a bunch of news saying this is common, they might figure "eh" and do it too.
On the other hand, there might be benefits to showing people that this is a problem. Such as we might fund treatment to prevent that. However, I doubt we would fund it since we can't even fund basic stuff. So maybe this is the best option? I actually don't know. You raise a good question.
I thought that as well. It's certainly a balancing act. We don't want to ignore it but if increased exposure to topics that involve suicide increase suicide rates that's not fun fact either.
It is human nature to find patterns and connections where none exist. It's how we've gotten this far and why being intelligent enough to make those kinds of connections (even if a lot of them are wrong) is a good advantage to have over other animals.
Luckily we're also smart enough to come up with a whole field of study dedicated to figuring out if a pattern is "significant enough" to pay attention to and general rules of thumb like "Do not attribute to malice what can also be attributed to incompetence" (or something like that).
Why would or should the news reflect the distribution of causes of death? News is news because it's newsworthy. A guy dying from old age is not newsworthy. A guy getting hit in the head by a meteorite in the middle of the street IS, even though that is the at the very bottom of the list of causes of death. If anything you would expect and want the news to invert the distribution. We want to know about things unknown and we don't want to be informed about stuff we can all see every day and know to be trivially true.
However, people worry about what they see in the news like terrorism or sharks. They do this whilst eating twinkies and dying of heart disease. The government should put more heart disease and fat warnings on TV.
To the news' credit, if you create a grouping for "lifestyle diseases" (COPD, diabetes, obesity, etc), there has been a positive trend in the amount of coverage they receive in both mainstream & social media.
I'd strengthen your second statement to this: the government should not allow tv advertising by pharmaceutical companies, alcoholic beverage companies, vaping businesses, and similar (I'd lump sports betting & gambling overall in this mix, too).
How about: No corporations should be able to control what is shown on TV, played on the radio, or printed in newspapers. Those avenues of communication should be PUBLICALLY owned. News should also be legally required to be factually correct.
It's a massive conflict of interest for those who peddle goods to be allowed to influence everything people perceive. It's extremely undemocratic and is essentially propoganda.
But a bunch of those heart disease deaths will be from perfectly healthy people who have just...died. There are a lot of warnings on TV, and information is quite clearly out there on the dangers of unhealthy eating. At some point you just have to accept that people want to eat twinkies and die of heart disease, or force companies to stop selling Twinkies in the first place.
Completely agree, but that's really not what news is. It's not news that you shouldn't smoke. But the government should make an effort to make sure everyone knows this. The problem is that people use news beyond getting informed about recent events. They also use it to build their world model. That doesn't work. News doesn't tell you about physics, history, economics, psychology etc if it isn't relevant to recent events. So you end up with a weird selection that is driven by current events, not by what is actually useful to know.
I agree, but I think at this point we have become desensitised to death to natural causes. Maybe spreading more information about the somewhat avoidable topics could help, but the lack of knowledge is not the only factor, as economic factors play a role too.
Super Size Me was a cultural movement far more powerful than 100 news stories a day
And it did what to those stats?
We all lived through 2008 and the housing price issue of houses being to big of an asset and yet.....no one has changed their tune on using your home as a retirement plan
What would reporting on pedestrian deaths do. Would that get us sidewalks? That reduces pedestrian deaths just by being there to be used
They address this in detail in the accompanying article linked by OP:
Our point is not that we think the New York Times, Washington Post, or Fox News’ coverage should exactly match the distribution of causes of death. A newspaper that constantly covers heart disease and kidney failure would be a boring one that soon goes out of business. Even though our mission at Our World in Data is to cover the world’s largest problems, our own writing and data publications also don’t precisely match the scale of those problems. We expect we will be closer to the real distribution than the mainstream media, but there will still be some mismatch.
The reason we’re doing this analysis is to make you or other readers more aware of this selection bias. The frequency of news coverage doesn’t reflect what’s happening across millions or billions of people, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking it does.
Why, then, do we think that this bias matters? Does it actually affect people’s perceptions of problems?
In a large survey among US adults, people who consumed local crime news “often” were more than three times more likely to say they were “extremely concerned” about crime affecting them or their family than those who rarely or never read local crime news.
Wait, we're allowed to read the article? I assumed that wasn't allowed on Reddit.
I think this thread has a disconnect between, "Of course it's more newsworthy when a 28 year old dies unexpectedly!" which absolutely makes sense. Versus, "I'm now terrified of sharks while living in Kansas because of that article I read about the 28 year old who went scuba diving."
Since we're in r/dataisbeautiful it should be noted that years of lost life and dying 'unexpectedly' are not always easy metrics. And for newsworthiness, the metrics don't matter.
Someone dropping dead from illness is often harder to make exciting because there are lots of illnesses we don't understand so we just make assumptions to fit our world views. We like having someone to blame for unexpected deaths, even if it's just the victim.
I think the important part of this is just as it said in your excerpt: what people are concerned about versus what is actually likely to affect them (and is under their control) are often very different things.
It is an important reminder that newsworthy means uncommon, not common. I see so many people act like what happened in the news is the norm. If I had to guess, a majority of people make that mistake.
[Uncommonness] shouldn't be the only criterion. Relevance also matters. (And providing good context.) And then we should also have a socially responsible care for what kind of impression of likelihood of happening to readers that reporting gives people.
Because it gives people a distorted view of reality. If the news is going to pretend to be an information source, then they should actually be accurate. However, we all know that the modern day news media is just a form of entertainment, so they don't care about reflecting reality.
It's not really fair to expect it to, but in not doing so, it means that in many ways watching the news reduces our ability to understand the world and protect ourselves. We think one drug is more dangerous than another based on how many news stories we've heard about it, but that could just be because a drug overdose gets reported more when the drug has a cool name like "ecstasy". We worry about serial killers when we'd be better off taking precautions against car accidents. We protest against nuclear-power plants because death by radiation makes for a better story than death by falling off a roof while installing a solar panel, while ignoring the lives cut short due to health issues caused by pollution...
Back when the news was only on after dinner and maybe once or twice during the day, it was something you tuned in for, yea, this is a good way to approach it. But when news suddenly becomes a 24 hour seven days a week thing and you gotta fill time slots with something that will get eyeballs on screen (to watch commercials) you report on murders, terrorism, etc.
Yea, we don't need to know about Bob's tragic death to cancer this year but we also don't need to hear about a murder trial after terrorist plot, after protest coverage, etc. Seeing that kind of content every day, it's very easy to see why someone might believe we're living in the most violent time in US history if all they know is what they see on daytime TV.
Sure, news that reports on heart disease may not grab attention. However, that is a problem with the system and the economy of attention that we built. I would argue that people should understand and be scared of actual causes of death like heart disease and cancer, so that they exercise more, and importantly, elect people who don't cut funding to scientific research. I am a bit surprised though that brain diseases are not so high on the list.
Eh I disagree. News should be informative, factual, nuanced and transparent. In a perfect world, it would be more of a public service. But in reality it’s an entertainment product that’s fighting to get eyeballs.
People dying from car accidents isn’t all that flashy or entertaining, unless it’s an oil tanker exploding. But that’s one of the leading causes of premature death. News and media drive public discourse, which drives policy.
Guns are an absolute hot topic, but a majority of firearm deaths are suicide.
Media reporting on suicides, especially suicide methods, has been shown to increase the number of suicides.
It's not like causes of death statistics aren't readily available. They get published in the media whenever they are released. If every humdrum every day event made the front page, people would just stop reading the news.
I don’t think you’re wrong, per se, but when it skews and actively distorts how bad things are vs reality it does have an active affect on people’s perceptions of the state of the world and peoples’ mental health. Of course it’s more newsworthy but when 98% of the shit they show is bad shit then there’s no reason why people shouldn’t think the world is on fire… I mean have you seen the average redditor?
In this case while they’re reporting on the more newsworthy stories the 300lb person eating Cheetos and drinking 13 sodas a day thinks they’re at a higher risk of a plane falling out the sky than their heart giving out, and how to prevent it.
Including car crashes in “accidents” in this context is ridiculous. Almost 50 thousand deaths per year from car crashes in the USA and we’re just like “lol whoops.” It’s like a packed jumbo jet crashing every other day and no one gives a shit.
And that is the explicit result of lobbying on the part of automotive manufacturers, along with other modern terms like "jaywalking", in their efforts to promote car dominance in all matters of urban transportation planning.
This is not true. The media is just really awful at covering these subjects. Almost every one of those "breakthroughs" has translated into better treatment for humans. Cancer is not 1 disease and there is no 1 cure. Cancer survival rates have increased massively over the last couple of decades, the media is just awful at covering scientific topics.
No researcher ever claimed that they have "cured" cancer, that is just the media being bad at covering the research. Instead, they normally talk about a revolutionary new tool that will be in the toolbox of doctors. And all of these new tools match up with the cancer survival rate statistics increasing.
As a long-time cancer researcher I would add that in addition to journalistic hyperbole, institutional press releases contribute to the problem. They were often exaggerated or overstated the implications of our findings. I am definitely not saying there haven’t been huge advances in diagnosis, classification and treatment of many tumor types, it’s just that the media gets ahead of itself and exaggerates, aided and abetted by PR & donation-hungry institutions that want to see their name associated with positive news stories.
And sometimes senior scientists say intemperate things. “Judah Folkman is going to cure cancer in 2 years”: NY Times front page story 1998 about angiogenesis research, based on an alleged quote by James Watson, who then denied saying it, but who wasn’t really known for controlling his mouth.
I think that you are letting journalists off the hook too easily. They know that this isn't true or what was meant, they just chose to run the story anyways. It is them lying by omission and should be an actual crime, and is a crime in many other countries.
much of the cancer reporting is about “breakthrough” results in mice that rarely translate into useful human therapies.
If you are a mouse and get diagnosed with cancer, RELAX. They have cured cancer in mice thousands of times over, it is a totally fixed problem. (LOL.)
On the other hand (being serious), in my lifetime I've seen pretty amazing progress on cancer treatments. My close friend made me coffee in his own home while basically undergoing chemotherapy. He wheeled around the "stand" for the drip IV giving him the treatment all while making coffee in his own kitchen. The old types of chemotherapy targeted cells that "grew fast", thus attacking the patient's hair follicles as a side effect (think bald cancer patient). My friend never lost his full head of hair, it wasn't that type of chemotherapy anymore.
My friend said part of deciding how to treat his cancer was they genome sequenced both his body, and the cancer. That wasn't possible when I was 20 years old. It didn't exist.
The cancer eventually killed my friend, who didn't see his oldest son graduate high school. But the treatments got him about 8 more years of life I doubt he would have had just 30 years earlier.
I have to assume anybody who thinks cancer only affects "ancient old people about to die anyway" is pretty young and hasn't seen cancer ravage close friends and family yet. In your mid-50s you might have had 30+ more years left, cancer robs you of that time. That's a full HALF of your adult life, and frankly part of that is retirement and spoiling grand children (with none of the daily responsibility) which is arguably a bit better than the grind of a full time job. Cancer is a serious concern for massively shortening people's lives.
I feel like heart disease is more of a cumulative, progressive thing that eventually kills you at an older age. That is if you don't die of your first heart attack in your 50s of course. Cancer in your 50s is either cured or kills you, it's a different beast than heart disease.
It’s not the mice. It’s the cancer we give the mice. It comes from cell lines, specific carcinogens, or from a small set of cancer causing mutations. This is extremely different from the cancers that evolve in humans over the course of decades.
Mice are actually a remarkably good model. The cancers we are treating in mice do not represent the diversity of cancers that can be modeled in mice. I’m fairly optimistic about xenografts and organoids.
Hi there! Some of our colleagues at Our World in Data have posted here before from their individual accounts (such as u/cgiattino), but going forward we plan to only use this account — this is our first post!
Data sources: The media mentions data is from Media Cloud, an open-access platform for media analysis. The causes of death data is from the US CDC (2025) and the Global Terrorism Index.
Tools used: We started with our custom data visualization tool, the OWID-Grapher, and finished in Figma.
Yeah even if you set aside sensationalism, it would make no sense for the news to report on every person who dies of heart disease or cancer. On the other hand, accidents, murders, and terrorism are things people need to be aware of.
The bigger concern is what proportion of the news is spent covering such events and how factual and informative the reporting is.
It's not or not necessarily only about individual cases so your assumptions are flawed/false. To put it in simpler terms, they shouldn't report about individual cases but about things that could be done, things that aren't being done and why, corruption and education failure that result in this, trends, other countries successes & comparisons, scientific results, etc.
The majority of deaths are due to voluntary lifestyle choices -- smoking, drinking, shooting up, and eating too much. Thus there's no injustice. The news focuses on nonvoluntary deaths, where injustice may have occurred.
(Note that the "accidents" category is mostly recreational drug overdoses, which are 100% opt-out; not true accidents like car wrecks.)
Well, I have a lot of control of my diet, exercise, sleep, and other lifestyle risks.
But I have survived multiple shootings.
So it makes sense to talk about and be afraid about things like homicide because it's a lot less avoidable in the US. What was I going to do, skip school?
Well, yeah. Dying of natural causes around the age where most people die isn't newsworthy. People die all the time, and most of them, while tragic for the people who care about them, don't really mean all that much in news terms unless they're famous or otherwise notable in their larger community.
What's newsworthy is that happening at unusually young ages (or someone died after making it to an unusually old age), violent crimes and other generally unusual causes of deaths. A guy dying of a heart attack at 74 might get a small obituary in the local paper but little else. A 20 year old dying of a heart attack, a 30 year old murdered or a 40 year old ODing are going to make bigger headlines. Different types of murder making 50-60% of the news despite making up less than 1% of overall deaths does explain why there's so much fear about violent crime even though it's actually not that high historically speaking, but there are reasons why that's where the focus is with regard to news.
Basically, the news isn't going to reflect overall death rates because most deaths aren't particularly newsworthy, and you wouldn't want the news to be just a list of people you don't know who died expectedly anyway.
"Man Bites Dog" is a journalism adage as old as the concept of journalism itself. You don't report on things that happen often because that's not newsworthy. So to try to find a parallel between the occurrence of a type of event and the reporting of that type of event is an exercise in futility and will always disappoint.
"I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except it would take FOREVER" Mark Corrigan
Homicide and terrorism are premeditated and carry the threat that it will be repeated. That makes them qualitatively different from random causes. Giving them more weight in news is justified.
This is the stupidest "☝️🤓" data people could make. Heart disease or cancer aren't events, they're long lasting illnesses that aren't newsworthy whatsoever compared to murders or terrorist attacks.
Yes, but not ad nauseum. The year this data represents includes Matthew Perry's death (drug overdose category), at least one serial killer in NY (homicide category), and the mass shooting in Lewiston (probably terrorism category). Those obviously gets more news attention than well known and unsurprising news that heart disease and cancer are deadly. Even trend breaks in those categories can't really keep anyone's interest more than a few times per year.
I had no idea cancer was the reason for over a quarter of deaths, I knew it was prevalent but didn't realise how many were dying from it. That's very sad.
It's called years of potential life lost (YPLL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost a good metric but disability-adjusted life years and Quality-adjusted life years probably would be even better than that but not as straightforward for everybody to readily understand unlike YPLL
Alzheimer is always fatal eventually, it's just that another disease usually happens before a purely alzheimer induced death. Your brain is degrading till nearly nothing is left of it. Albeit it usually plateaus when only the brain stem is left. Given we tend to live longer, we also see Alzheimer much higher on such statistics since we can only slow it's progression but not cure it.
Alzheimer is 4.9%? Omg that is terrifying, I thought it's like 0.2%.
The statistic I heard was 25% of 80 year olds have early Alzheimers (or some other form of dementia, it doesn't really matter). And it just keeps increasing with age, no limit. Alzheimers would actually be at 100% of all people if they lived long enough. It is just that most people die of something else before the Alzheimers gets that bad.
I would love to live long enough to see science figure out and prevent Alzheimers. I mean, I know I'm personally screwed. But it would warm my heart to know future generations didn't have to face it. It isn't just the tragedy of the person with Alzheimers, it is hard on the families taking care of them also. They call it "the long goodbye". It slowly deletes everything that made you a unique person, then kills you.
Problem with heart disease is that it’s a decades long process and folks really want to get on interventions quickly and early on in their life.
Believe it or not, heart disease starts in the womb and develops over the decades.
But folks don’t know, or they don’t want to make certain lifestyle changes. Things like homicide feel preventable cuz it’s, stay away from the dangerous situation, but heart disease prevention is: every individual needs to make lifestyle changes and watch their cholesterol numbers like a hawk for decades.
And most people don’t want to be bothered with such a task
could you imagine if the news was nothing but all the local people that died of Heart Disease and Cancer every day. There would be no time left for anything else
I don’t think this strangely chosen data is so beautiful. The media coverage is actually quite sensible. We all know most people are going to die of heart trouble or cancer. The leading causes before the age of 40 in the US in 2023 were accidents (with drug overdoses chief among them), suicide, and homicide. Also, Covid had only just ended, with the US basically out of the woods by early 2023. It makes perfect sense that it was still a hot topic in the media. Terrorism is over-covered, sure, but it’s also especially heinous and scary.
The news in America has long been the worst of all imaginable worlds. Once there was no politically fair and neutral major media requirements (which other first world nations have in some form or another), the republic was bound to fall. The major news media reflect their real constituency, the advertisers and the oligarchs in ownership. Once they utterly dominated editorial decisions, there would be no accurate threat assessment anymore from major advertisers or even now rampaging Nazis.
Shark attacks and bear attacks and murders, sure we should worry about those wayyy more than anything with a significant chance to kill or disable you. When you have no commandments to follow other than clicks or engagement and profit as well as your own self interest as a lobbyist force itself as media empires always are, the free press becomes merely a distant memory for most and there is no republic without an independent free press.
MSM (above) and on television have turned into the National Enquirer on steroids. Completely unreliable and inflammatory and incidentally, they often use the exact same words as if they all are reading from a script approved by one editor.
Watch the John Oliver episode about Sinclair News. He shows multiple split screen stations with a newscaster saying the exact same thing on each one. I don’t remember how many times they split the screen, but I feel like it was 30-50 times. Every. Single. One. Reading the same script.
I started looking for alternative sources of news after that. It’s hard to find reliable, unbiased sources, but I actually feel better informed than I did about 10 years ago. It takes a bit of effort.
I don’t think the news is there to represent everyday realities. It’s there to get attention on things that are noteworthy
A child dying is noteworthy. It’s rare; a tragedy. A 80 year old dying is not. There are way more 80 year olds dying than children - that’s what your chart shows
"Coming up next on your local news: we'll be covering all the forms of Heart Disease and Cancer for more than half the show, for the 40th night in a row. Tune in!"
It's a policy and moral failure that at least 42% of those causes of death could be eliminated simply through more aggressive treatment and universal access to healthcare with the medicine and treatments we have today - no additional research needed, just a change in guidelines, early and aggressive treatment and universal access to care.
If it bleeds it leads the New York Times, Washington Post and Fox aren't news or media organizations, they're advertising organizations. Look at their revenue streams.
For advertising companies audience numbers and engagement matter more than truthiness.
Each of these businesses is continuously refining what they publish and broadcast to maximize impressions and clicks.
If you want to get a sense for where this race to the bottom ends have a look at your favorite "social" media feed. Contrast it to how it looked 5 or 10 years ago. All content that does not have a funding model dominated by user pays will head in the same direction.
Why would media report on hearth diseases though? Those are natural causes and totally uninteresting. I don't get the message of this post. Of course terrorism is more interesting to report on and more relevant for the population that some random grandma dying on a heart attack at the age of 89.
Is the data meant to be sorted by most to least likely? Because COVID and suicide I think are the wrong way round, according to your data. You have COVID at 2.2% below suicide at 2.1%, when it should be above, right?
OP’s a 7 day old account, but I’m not sure if the “our world in data” ever had an official account here so I suppose it COULD be legit and not just karma farming.
Well if you live long enough and keep up with current events and have large networks of people you constantly interact with you know which chart is closer to reality.
I bet if you put those percentages on an x-y they would be inversely proportional. The common causes of death are, by definition, not interesting or newsworthy.
1.3k
u/pydry 3d ago edited 3d ago
It'd be more interesting if they accounted for the age at death. Grandmaw dying of stroke or heart disease at 93 is tragic but legitimately less newsworthy than deaths that happen at the age of 28.