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:
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"
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.
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.
> the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
All my grandparents lived well into their 90s (mediterranean lifestyle + modern medicine), and all of them would’ve chosen euthanasia had it been an option (they phrased that in various ways - essentially something along the lines of “if God could bring me home now it’d be good”).
It’s been a sobering thing to experience and it leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in their position, that option will be available to me somehow.
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.
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."
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Man...... when did these press companies get so out of touch with reality that they wouldn't even pay respect to the fact that people are actually dying here.
So sad.
> 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.
A system that rewards our worst instincts is exhibiting a failure. There are worse systems, sure. But capitalism has its own downsides and this is one of them.
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.
> 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 think this is the whole point of the article. The news does not cover reality as it is, it selects information that is noteworthy and drives clicks/views/engagement/ad revenue.
This is why the news has been shown to increasingly misrepresent reality:
It also has to do with “deserving” death, or injustice. Someone who is obese dies of a chronic illness, or a smoker, etc. doesn’t register as news, or even the cause themselves, because the vast majority of obese people and smokers know themselves that their lifestyles lead to illness and early death.
But dying from a criminal act? It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable than grand lifestyle changes across the whole population. If a felon with 50+ arrests murders someone, a “quick” adjustment in laws could prevent it in the future
>It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable
is it though? Crime has been with us since the dawn of civilization. It's easier to tell a story in which crime is personalized and framed as preventable but in reality there's always new modes of crime, new criminals, always the incentive for people to steal when they can, and so on.
When societies manage to "stomp out" crime they're no less brutal than when they attempt to stop a pandemic. I think what a society frames as aberrant is just a reflection of the kind of public morality they endorse. A society of pirates probably thinks scorbut is more undeserved than being punished for theft.
Gang violence among gang members is a life style choice. For children involved in gang violence it’s much more problematic. An adult who freely chooses to make their living on the street is a bit less unnerving as the lifestyle can lead there. When an innocent person is shot during gang violence, it is much more newsworthy.
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here
"Gang violence among gang members is a life style choice. For children involved in gang violence it’s much more problematic."
Gang membership is skewed younger and often includes "children" (depends on definition) 14+. Makes it a little tricky about lifestyle choice when dealing with minors.
The problem with "throwing the book" at gang members is that it doesn't work.
Nobody joining a gang is making a rational reckoning of the risk/reward of getting caught by the police, partly because they don't plan to get caught and partly because the much larger risk is getting killed.
And the people getting arrested and prosecuted are primarily not the people calling the shots or driving recruitment of new members.
The best way to put a dent in gang violence is to disrupt gang recruiting, and one of the better ways to do that is to improve societal safety nets so joining a gang is less attractive.
Sure, throwing the book doesn't get you 100%. But am I supposed to believe that increasing the penalty for doing the wrong thing doesn't decrease the frequency of the wrong thing? Having everyone you know in your crime circle being in jail vs. roaming free certainly has an effect on your decisions to join/stay.
Probability of punishment seems to matter more than severity of punishment. This follows from economic and game theoretic models and is backed up by empirical studies.
It turns out that when your big worries are "not being able to afford rent and food" and then "getting shot", the difference between 5 years and 20 years in jail, or the difference between a 10% likelihood or 50% likelihood that you get caught don't really factor into the decision-making process.
This sounds great until you’re minding your own business in your house while these people engage in gun battles out in the street and you or your kids catch one of the strays.
If you google this you will find plenty of examples that made the news, and not all of them do.
Here is an article including two such examples. One kid was sitting down eating dinner and the other was sitting in a car. They were both shot totally incidentally during shootouts they had nothing to do with.
People are injured by celebratory fire all the time. That said, getting hit by a stray bullet of any sort is very very rare, which is the reason the stories stick in your head. Children get killed and injured (or injure others) by playing with unsecured guns as well.
The fact is that if there are guns around, there is a little bit of danger especially if they are loaded. Stricter gun laws tend to produce less gun violence and accidents.
That doesn't move mortality numbers much though. It's something like 50 deaths per year from stray bullets, vs 20,000+ homicides, vs 40,000 ish fatal car accident deaths.
That homicides make the news much more than car accidents, and stray bullets make the news at all, is kinda the point of the article.
It is theoretically possible but in the 20+ years I’ve lived here there has never been an innocent bystander killed, and maybe 5 murders I can remember. I live in a wealthy enclave of a major city. I’m just a city guy, I’m not concerned
> 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.
Accidental death is the #3 cause of death. Your level of safety is primarily down to your own actions. Ladders are the most dangerous piece of equipment commonly owned. Murder and random crime are a minor fraction of this category. Suicide is twice as common as murder.
> crime is unpredictable
Types of crime maybe. Location of crime? Almost completely predictable.
>Age is not evenly distributed across the population
But luckily, unlike wealth inequality, age inequality is decreasing. Fewer people have little of it and more people have more of it than ever before in this country.
You could also just cap it 49 or 54 years old. A lot of medical research does this when looking into things like cancers. It gives a pretty good indication of whats going on during early and prime year without as much longevity bias or 'old age/natural causes' deaths skewing the data. If you make it fully age weighted then you might adjust away things like murder for the 35+ crowd, or overinflate things like SIDS, drowning, and childhood cancers.
In terms of younger people, a really surprising thing I learnt the other day: "for Americans age 18-45, the leading cause of death is fentanyl overdose"
Odd this article doesn't even mention it.. well actually apparently its "4x over-reported"
I believe homicide rate is frequently cited simply because it's the only crime rate that is remotely reliable. Other crimes get underreported but it's hard for the police to ignore a body with a gunshot wound.
Although it would be an interesting chart. But the distinction between what is noteworthy/newsworthy and what actually kills is precisely the point of investigating this topic.
On the other hand, you're most likely to die of heart disease, yet the interventions needed push heart disease well into old age should start as young as possible.
So if you wanted to improve your diet and lifestyle, it makes more sense to first pull the major levers that avoid or postpone your most likely killers before you, say, worry about food dyes.
Yet not even our new HHS seems to understand that.
An overwhelming majority of deaths were the elderly. Weirdly so. Kids (outside of pre existing conditions) were basically immune, better off than the flu.
The “life expectancy loss” metric was much different than raw numbers.
But almost no 14 year olds get murdered. When you take it as a percent of all 14 year olds, it’s almost nothing. Certainly not an excuse to pull guns from millions of legal owners who have a right to protect themselves no matter how much the media and the left sensationalize it.
You have the right to own guns so that they can be used to defend against a tyrant attempting to take over the country. You have guns so that you can defend the fundamental principles and rights on which your country was founded.
Now that you have elected a tyrant, who wants to destroy everything that made America special, I don’t think you should really be allowed to own guns. The premise for that right has been invalidated. We are living through a demonstration of its failure.
Why should you be allowed to own a gun? What is the rationale for that right? Because as far as I can tell Americans have proven that they never deserved it.
The constitution does not talk about self-defence. The constitution does not talk about hunting. The constitution does not talk about sports shooting. The constitution talks about protecting freedom, and instead you have voluntarily surrendered it. You don’t deserve guns and you don’t deserve freedom. You deserve nothing.
It's not about age. It's about deviations from expectations. No newspaper is going to write "grey elephant crosses street" but you can be sure they will report "pink elephant crosses street" because it's unusual.
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.
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.
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.
Those last ones reflect the dominant employment sector in each city, right? That seems like what you'd want to see given a lot of viewers will be involved in that kind of news or want updates on it?
Not exactly. It's the dominant outlier. Entertainment is not the largest sector in LA, but it's the most unique. Finance isn't the largest sector in NYC, but again the most unique.
Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
> That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.
Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.
("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)
>That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.
I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic, ignorant talking heads that I wouldn’t even trust to tell me the weather.
I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.
We have ample evidence that getting your news from the talking heads on cable news tends to lead to a really warped view of the world. But I'm not at all sure that getting it from TikTok will end up better.
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.
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)
I'm taking issue with the suggestion that people's actions to pursue Option B means they don't actually want Option A.
This is not true.
They actually want Option A and they also actually want Option B.
Picking Option B does not imply the desire for Option A is false or illegitimate, it implies that people hold many authentic yet contradictory desires simultaneously and make tradeoffs (often regrettable ones) between them.
If you create a system that gets people to pick Option B consistently, you have not revealed the insincerity of their desire for Option A. You have built a system that compels people to act against their own legitimate desires for their own lives. In a media/social media context, this compulsion is often consciously designed in the audience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.
I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem: people becoming overly engaged with something that they should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without changing their behavior significantly.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue, the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias, omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings. If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in the limited technical sense of direct commission.
Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" — and that inherently means a rush to create or update articles when news outlets publish something novel.
I find the source collating of Wikipedia helpful for recent events. That's when you're going to get most editor interest to improve the page and readers to consume it.
> In principle, all Wikipedia articles should contain up-to-date information. Editors are also encouraged to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events.
There clearly is editor and reader interest in making decent quality articles on major current events. Yes they may contain errors that the history book on topic won't contain, but I still think it's worth having. Just mind the things to avoid listed in WP:NOTNEWS and I think we will be fine
And I don't think everything will ever be covered in a book. There is not an infinite amount of scholars studying every random significant event. And those will probably use the same news articles as one of their sources anyway.
Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the truth. It’s a mirror not a light. News articles are a source of information because they can be verified. For every claim where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times “relevant sources” getting it wrong.
I'm not sure that the media lately has been 100x times more accurate than a Ouija board, but I'm going to ignore that for now.
The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.
For example:
- only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade
- renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing
- Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's
Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.
Your personal opinions and conclusions aren’t facts, you cite the “basic metrics” from a reputable source and Wikipedia will accept it. It doesn’t have to be a news article. Many of examples that you gave don’t stand a cursory scrutiny of being “facts”. Wikipedia has multitude of information citing basics metrics about the world.
This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner nationwide attention.
The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.
Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.
My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego, resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are usually better if there's some baseline.
For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
> It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth.
Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.
I don't know for certain, but I believe it's because newpapers (aka "The Press") are at risk of libel or slander charges if they don't get their facts straight. That may also be a US-centric thing, too, I am not sure. To put a pin on it, we want to believe that the possibility of punishment for misrepresenting facts imposes some level of accountability on a print publication.
Still, despite the fact that they can be sued for lying by the people they are lying about, I'm sure they find plenty of ways to bend the truth while still technically telling it.
I suppose that calls into question why we trust any media source that we can't directly verify ourselves as an authority. It's all very confusing to me, to be honest and I simply don't know what to do about it. Not being able to trust information is maddening.
News is, by definition, unusual. If you consume it to learn about unusual events then it can be alright. If you use it to build a picture about common events, you're going to end up with a completely upside down picture.
My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.
> The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences (such as a dog biting a man.)
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.
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.
Nobody wants to hear the kids are dead because the moron parents forgot to lock their own pool gate or because they got wasted behind the wheel. They want to hear the evil inanimate objects or drug dealers did it, someone other than the parents.
You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.
As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.
It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.
We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract, but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds, and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence for harm in young children.
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. "
I've heard of school districts doing simulated shootings with BB guns, masked men going through the halls to shout at the students, etc. That seems like needlessly frightening theater for no real gain (and might confuse the students ,at that )
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.
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.
1. Death isn’t preventable. We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of another cause of death. Sure it might extend your life a little bit, but I feel it’s entirely rational to seek out information on causes of immediate death as more relevant than causes of long term death. The probability of living much older than 100 is virtually nil. Probably good to have information on both though.
2. It’s possible they are major causes of early death, but I can’t figure that out from the article and it would be nice if the article provided that information.
> We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of another cause of death.
I can tell you're quite young :-)
Old age is pretty broad, and you really need to start worrying at some point in your 40s. Although death due to these is rare at that age, you'll likely end up knowing 1-3 people who will die of these at that age. And a lot more in the 50s.
There's a huge difference between dying in your 60s (perhaps right before retirement), and dying in your 80s. Lumping all of these people into "old age" is likely a byproduct of the same biases that cause journalism to not report on it.
Although we should remember that “old age” is long. Someone can die at 72 from heart disease and people might just call that dying of old age when that person could have easily lived another decade or two if they made different lifestyle choices. That would be more of an “early death” than a centenarian dying in a car accident. The suddenness is irrelevant.
There's some dissention as to whether this actually helps lengthen life for most people (the salt myth). You shouldn't ignore your doctor, but neither should you blindly accept poor science.
Yeah, that always happens. There's people that think you should only eat fruit or that coffee enemas are the way to perfect health.
But the fact remains that there are multiple studies with strong links of higher sodium intake to heart attacks. Further, globally pretty much all major medical organizations (especially in countries with well functioning health systems) agrees on limiting salt intake.
There will always be a few studies that show that "actually you should eat 20g of salt a day!" and to me, that is the bad science.
The medical consensus by both studies and the experts is that you should limit salt. Telling someone "but those studies were all bad" doesn't convince me that the counter studies are good, but instead convinces me that the counter studies were likely flawed. If there were more studies that reinforced the bad studies, that might be something to talk about. But as it stands, we have just a noisy minority (suspiciously selling books...) that is making a claim without the significant studies to back their media tours.
Right. But what age it happens at can (often) be shifted.
Same for stroke, kidney disease, diabetes, cancer. Those all usually hit older ages and have an age-related component, the risk of them at any age group is reduced by diet and exercise. Those two things can be true.
The claim was "heart disease is not primarily age related". This is a thread about causes of death. If we interpret that claim as "fatal heart disease is not primarily age related", it's straightforwardly false.
Though age also indexes the area under the curve of lifetime exposure to the risks, so it becomes a trivial claim to say that it's age related since it's one of the two axes.
If you have a heart attack at age 50 but with lifestyle intervention (or PCSK9 loss-of-function genetics) you instead would have had it at age 90, then "primarily age-related" is an insufficient claim in this thread.
Uh... it absolutely is? Not sure what you're trying to say here. All progressive diseases, including heart disease (cancer too) are going to be "age related" simply because they take time to develop.
And plaque-related heart disease, the big killer, takes a long time to develop. The statistics are really clear here. People under 30 simply don't die of congestive heart failure absent one of a handful of very rare disorders. It starts to show up in middle age and really takes off after 70.
They are preventable, sure. They are "early" deaths in that the sufferer would die before something else got them. But they absolutely skew toward the elderly. Heavily.
Just doing a quick check on this, lifestyle choices slightly edges out net worth.
Living what is called a "low-risk" lifestyle (don't drink, don't smoke, maintain healthy weight, avoid junk food) results in an average life expectancy of 90 (93 for women, 87 for men), compared to being in the top 1% which results in a life expectancy of 87 (86 for men, 88 for women).
The overall average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 (76 for men, 81 for women).
Lifestyle choices have a far larger impact on average. The big gains in lifespan (and healthspan) come from delaying the onset of chronic disease rather than treating it after it occurs.
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.
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.
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.
If you have access to the best healthcare you definitely don’t wait in the same queues. You have direct access to the specialists, often at the best teaching hospitals too.
Like Stanford pulmonologist in less than a week for an asthma eval.
Meanwhile, my Mom waited months on Medicare for a heart eval due to arrhythmias.
Whatever plan you have, it doesn’t sound top tier?
This didn’t require high net worth, just a better plan through an employer - or you’re in an area with low specialist populations? Or some sort of low priority on a triage schedule?
If you have mm net worth, the specialists come to you - quickly - unless you really need the .001% specialist. and chances are you they don’t and it’s not worth it.
But even Kaiser had no issues giving less than a week access for anything important.
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?
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'.
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.
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 ...)
People believe that we can prevent and pacify terrorism because it comes from a belief system that we disagree with. Diabetes is just caused by the instinct of eating.
Also people don't really "see" diabetes, news don't show picture of sick livers, people don't understand the science of it. Terrorism is easier to represent compared to diabetes.
Also people believe that we can stop being a terrorist. But we can't decide what happens in our liver.
Another big difference is that you can fight terrorism with the military, but not diabetes. So it's less entertaining and less "concerning".
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It gets close to dancing around my point, but the article actually doesn't mention old age at all.
The article insinuates that we don't care about heart disease, because heart disease is boring and common.
But death is a lot more complicated of an issue to society than this. Society expects that a young healthy person in the prime of their life is going to be around for their family and their friends. Other people are probably counting on them to still exist tomorrow. By contrast when an elderly person has been suffering on their deathbed with dementia for 10 years, and dies of heart disease, it's so much different situation for society, that person may not have many friends or family left, and they may not be able to interact with them, even if they are alive for another year. And the friends and family they have left may have been going through the grieving process for years already.
Society does not see all deaths as equal things no matter the circumstance. And so it's silly for this article to pretend that the only thing different between any of these deaths is the cause listed on the death certificate.
That section implies that news sources report on this because otherwise customers wouldn't be entertained enough to keep paying. The piece doesn't really engage with the argument you're responding to.
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.
It's not the responsibility of news organizations to educate people. Health education should probably come from our educational institutions.
The statistics on the left hand in the article, unfortunately, have conflated preventable deaths with unpreventable deaths. While some of them made people preventable, we really have no clue how many. However, every single non-preventable death is included in that column. Talk about bias...
But when the outliers create an impression that is a falsehood - like that cities are intrinsically dangerous because of extreme levels of violent crime because violent crime is what gets reported?
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.
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.
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.
Its more like AI has made content from accounts created after 2022-2023 difficult to trust even more than the previous error of bots. Its like how nuclear tests made all steel not sourced from shipwrecks have too high of radiation to be used for high sensitivity radiation detectors
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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..
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)
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)
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).
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.
> 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.
All I can offer in response is what Dr. Offit said: "In 1991 there were roughly 30,000 in children less than 10 years of age who got hepatitis B in this country. Half of
them got it from their mothers. The other half got it from relatively casual contact um with from people who had chronic hepatitis B virus and didn't know it. How many people in the US are infected with hepatitis B virus? Do we know? Yes. So it's tens of thousands every year. And then in terms of how many are chronically infected, about a little over 2 million."
I recognize that big pharma has a ton of problems and questionable practices. But Dr. Offit's statement "The other half got it from relatively casual contact um with from people who had chronic hepatitis B virus and didn't know it." suggests that being born to moms w/o hep B is not without risk particularly given the outsize risk for cancer.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
>...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.
First, one doesn't need to be impaired to die from a drunk driver. Only ~60% of the people who die in DUI accidents are the impaired driver. You can do everything right, but you're constantly surrounded by people making mistakes. You are not alone on the road. And even then, nearly 70% of traffic fatalities did not involve any impairment!
You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.
Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was. Most people don't talk about it because as with everything (NFL halftime shows, restaurant logos, etc) in my quickly-regressing country, COVID is a topic that inflames passions.
> A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was.
I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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/
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-...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-c...
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.
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
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.
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.
> the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
All my grandparents lived well into their 90s (mediterranean lifestyle + modern medicine), and all of them would’ve chosen euthanasia had it been an option (they phrased that in various ways - essentially something along the lines of “if God could bring me home now it’d be good”).
It’s been a sobering thing to experience and it leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in their position, that option will be available to me somehow.
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.
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."
Also thats a much better visualization - thanks for sharing it. Kind of fascinating in a morbid way.
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.
>> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Man...... when did these press companies get so out of touch with reality that they wouldn't even pay respect to the fact that people are actually dying here. So sad.
We the people are the root cause. If we cared about what people really die of, press companies would write stories about that, to get our attention.
It's really that simple.
It's like my journalism professor told me since he used to be a news anchor ... "If it bleeds, it leads".
And the only institution with a mandate to educate and inform just got defunded.
... And why did they get defunded?
> 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.
A system that rewards our worst instincts is exhibiting a failure. There are worse systems, sure. But capitalism has its own downsides and this is one of them.
Do you really think it would be informing society if news stations constantly reported the number of cancer deaths that occurred in the last day?
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.
> 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 think this is the whole point of the article. The news does not cover reality as it is, it selects information that is noteworthy and drives clicks/views/engagement/ad revenue.
This is why the news has been shown to increasingly misrepresent reality:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32026
It also has to do with “deserving” death, or injustice. Someone who is obese dies of a chronic illness, or a smoker, etc. doesn’t register as news, or even the cause themselves, because the vast majority of obese people and smokers know themselves that their lifestyles lead to illness and early death.
But dying from a criminal act? It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable than grand lifestyle changes across the whole population. If a felon with 50+ arrests murders someone, a “quick” adjustment in laws could prevent it in the future
>It’s undeserved and arguably more easily preventable
is it though? Crime has been with us since the dawn of civilization. It's easier to tell a story in which crime is personalized and framed as preventable but in reality there's always new modes of crime, new criminals, always the incentive for people to steal when they can, and so on.
When societies manage to "stomp out" crime they're no less brutal than when they attempt to stop a pandemic. I think what a society frames as aberrant is just a reflection of the kind of public morality they endorse. A society of pirates probably thinks scorbut is more undeserved than being punished for theft.
I wonder gang related violence gets more coverage only if it results in innocent victims. Deserved vs undeserved. Probably does.
Gang violence among gang members is a life style choice. For children involved in gang violence it’s much more problematic. An adult who freely chooses to make their living on the street is a bit less unnerving as the lifestyle can lead there. When an innocent person is shot during gang violence, it is much more newsworthy.
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here
"Gang violence among gang members is a life style choice. For children involved in gang violence it’s much more problematic."
Gang membership is skewed younger and often includes "children" (depends on definition) 14+. Makes it a little tricky about lifestyle choice when dealing with minors.
The problem with "throwing the book" at gang members is that it doesn't work.
Nobody joining a gang is making a rational reckoning of the risk/reward of getting caught by the police, partly because they don't plan to get caught and partly because the much larger risk is getting killed.
And the people getting arrested and prosecuted are primarily not the people calling the shots or driving recruitment of new members.
The best way to put a dent in gang violence is to disrupt gang recruiting, and one of the better ways to do that is to improve societal safety nets so joining a gang is less attractive.
Citation needed.
Sure, throwing the book doesn't get you 100%. But am I supposed to believe that increasing the penalty for doing the wrong thing doesn't decrease the frequency of the wrong thing? Having everyone you know in your crime circle being in jail vs. roaming free certainly has an effect on your decisions to join/stay.
Probability of punishment seems to matter more than severity of punishment. This follows from economic and game theoretic models and is backed up by empirical studies.
For example: https://www.academia.edu/download/55552845/the_economics_of_...
> But am I supposed to believe that increasing the penalty for doing the wrong thing doesn't decrease the frequency of the wrong thing?
Yes. There is substantial evidence that increasing the severity of punishment does not reduce crime rates.
It turns out that when your big worries are "not being able to afford rent and food" and then "getting shot", the difference between 5 years and 20 years in jail, or the difference between a 10% likelihood or 50% likelihood that you get caught don't really factor into the decision-making process.
Surely, 3 strikes type laws that lock people away for longer who exhibit violent tendencies reduces crime experienced in society.
This sounds great until you’re minding your own business in your house while these people engage in gun battles out in the street and you or your kids catch one of the strays.
If you google this you will find plenty of examples that made the news, and not all of them do.
https://abc13.com/post/houston-police-increasing-patrols-7-y...
Here is an article including two such examples. One kid was sitting down eating dinner and the other was sitting in a car. They were both shot totally incidentally during shootouts they had nothing to do with.
People are injured by celebratory fire all the time. That said, getting hit by a stray bullet of any sort is very very rare, which is the reason the stories stick in your head. Children get killed and injured (or injure others) by playing with unsecured guns as well.
The fact is that if there are guns around, there is a little bit of danger especially if they are loaded. Stricter gun laws tend to produce less gun violence and accidents.
That doesn't move mortality numbers much though. It's something like 50 deaths per year from stray bullets, vs 20,000+ homicides, vs 40,000 ish fatal car accident deaths.
That homicides make the news much more than car accidents, and stray bullets make the news at all, is kinda the point of the article.
It is theoretically possible but in the 20+ years I’ve lived here there has never been an innocent bystander killed, and maybe 5 murders I can remember. I live in a wealthy enclave of a major city. I’m just a city guy, I’m not concerned
As in, you witnessed 5 murders or 5 people you know got killed/happened near you etc?
If so, I do not know how to tell you that this sounds insane..
> Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account
Age is not evenly distributed across the population. You could just break this down into age brackets and show a chart for each bracket.
> I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss.
The original data does have adjusted statistics similar to this:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db521.pdf
> 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.
Accidental death is the #3 cause of death. Your level of safety is primarily down to your own actions. Ladders are the most dangerous piece of equipment commonly owned. Murder and random crime are a minor fraction of this category. Suicide is twice as common as murder.
> crime is unpredictable
Types of crime maybe. Location of crime? Almost completely predictable.
>Age is not evenly distributed across the population
But luckily, unlike wealth inequality, age inequality is decreasing. Fewer people have little of it and more people have more of it than ever before in this country.
You could also just cap it 49 or 54 years old. A lot of medical research does this when looking into things like cancers. It gives a pretty good indication of whats going on during early and prime year without as much longevity bias or 'old age/natural causes' deaths skewing the data. If you make it fully age weighted then you might adjust away things like murder for the 35+ crowd, or overinflate things like SIDS, drowning, and childhood cancers.
City Nerd made a good video on how crime statistics often incorrectly compare to a cities overall safety: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4jG1i7jHSM
In terms of younger people, a really surprising thing I learnt the other day: "for Americans age 18-45, the leading cause of death is fentanyl overdose"
Odd this article doesn't even mention it.. well actually apparently its "4x over-reported"
I believe homicide rate is frequently cited simply because it's the only crime rate that is remotely reliable. Other crimes get underreported but it's hard for the police to ignore a body with a gunshot wound.
Although it would be an interesting chart. But the distinction between what is noteworthy/newsworthy and what actually kills is precisely the point of investigating this topic.
On the other hand, you're most likely to die of heart disease, yet the interventions needed push heart disease well into old age should start as young as possible.
So if you wanted to improve your diet and lifestyle, it makes more sense to first pull the major levers that avoid or postpone your most likely killers before you, say, worry about food dyes.
Yet not even our new HHS seems to understand that.
Same thing happened with COVID.
An overwhelming majority of deaths were the elderly. Weirdly so. Kids (outside of pre existing conditions) were basically immune, better off than the flu.
The “life expectancy loss” metric was much different than raw numbers.
Was COVID less harmful to kids than the flu? Organ damage and lung capacity may tell a different story as the cohort ages.
The real question is: was COVID less harmful for kids than lockdowns. I'm relatively confident it was.
But almost no 14 year olds get murdered. When you take it as a percent of all 14 year olds, it’s almost nothing. Certainly not an excuse to pull guns from millions of legal owners who have a right to protect themselves no matter how much the media and the left sensationalize it.
You have the right to own guns so that they can be used to defend against a tyrant attempting to take over the country. You have guns so that you can defend the fundamental principles and rights on which your country was founded.
Now that you have elected a tyrant, who wants to destroy everything that made America special, I don’t think you should really be allowed to own guns. The premise for that right has been invalidated. We are living through a demonstration of its failure.
Why should you be allowed to own a gun? What is the rationale for that right? Because as far as I can tell Americans have proven that they never deserved it.
The constitution does not talk about self-defence. The constitution does not talk about hunting. The constitution does not talk about sports shooting. The constitution talks about protecting freedom, and instead you have voluntarily surrendered it. You don’t deserve guns and you don’t deserve freedom. You deserve nothing.
Agreed, this would make for a great standard in mortality metrics.
It's not about age. It's about deviations from expectations. No newspaper is going to write "grey elephant crosses street" but you can be sure they will report "pink elephant crosses street" because it's unusual.
> 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).
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.
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.
> there's a section of road near where I live that's dangerous, and we all know it's dangerous
Clearly not enough people know it’s dangerous or how dangerous it is, or one of them would do something about it
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.
Those last ones reflect the dominant employment sector in each city, right? That seems like what you'd want to see given a lot of viewers will be involved in that kind of news or want updates on it?
Not exactly. It's the dominant outlier. Entertainment is not the largest sector in LA, but it's the most unique. Finance isn't the largest sector in NYC, but again the most unique.
Tech in SF may actually be the biggest sector, since tech is so big and prevalent, but it certainly wasn't in the 90s.
> That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.
Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.
("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)
>That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.
I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic, ignorant talking heads that I wouldn’t even trust to tell me the weather.
I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.
We have ample evidence that getting your news from the talking heads on cable news tends to lead to a really warped view of the world. But I'm not at all sure that getting it from TikTok will end up better.
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the issue is that this is what people want to watch and so it is even worse for algo feeds.
if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.
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.
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.
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)
I'm taking issue with the suggestion that people's actions to pursue Option B means they don't actually want Option A.
This is not true.
They actually want Option A and they also actually want Option B.
Picking Option B does not imply the desire for Option A is false or illegitimate, it implies that people hold many authentic yet contradictory desires simultaneously and make tradeoffs (often regrettable ones) between them.
If you create a system that gets people to pick Option B consistently, you have not revealed the insincerity of their desire for Option A. You have built a system that compels people to act against their own legitimate desires for their own lives. In a media/social media context, this compulsion is often consciously designed in the audience.
So news reports on crime, positive stories, weather, sports, and the dominant industry in the local area.
>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.
As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.
This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.
Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.
How is the news doing this?
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.
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.
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.
Reporting terrorism also benefits people who want to pass laws restricting peoples freedom or increasing powers of the state.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the important part of a media diet.
You can get a false sense of how common, dangerous, etc something is by the frequency of reports from a news outlet. What they are saying is true, but how relevant that is to the average person can be far from the truth.
A perfect example of this. I've seen here on HN people worried about crime on public transit (any crime, from murder to petty theft). Specifically citing the terrible crime problems of NY and CA transit. Yet when you actually look at the numbers, you see the crimes per day are closer to 1 or 2 while the travelers per day are in the millions. Meaning it's a literal 1 in a million event that you'll be the target of crime on public transit.
News outlets lie to you not by telling false stories but rather by weaving false narratives around the stories. "Crime is out of control" is the false narrative, but it's backed by real stories of crime, sometimes horrific.
I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.
So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.
I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
Transportation crime fear is compounded by another issue: "scary people." I've personally never witnessed a crime. But I've seen plenty of people that raised my hackles, usually they seem intoxicated or are exhibiting some kind behavior that may indicate mental illness. Are they going to get up and stab me? Probably not, but it sure seems like it could happen, and it sometimes (though rarely in terms of transite miles) does happen. I can intellectually dismiss other low prevalence issues in a way that it is hard to do with public transit, viscerally.
I know you meant "became wary" when you wrote "raised my hackles", but that phrase means "to (visibly) upset or arouse one's anger," which I'm sure is not what you meant. But it does speak to a large part of the problem: people becoming overly engaged with something that they should probably just acknowledge and be aware of, without changing their behavior significantly.
Crime hysteria seems like it gets people, who are unlikely to be victims of crimes but more likely to have outsize political influence, involved in law enforcement policy. Without being forced to dogfood the results of their own advocacy, you end up with policing rules written by people who rarely are forced to interact with police, and who are very scared of crime that never happens to them.
> Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story.
For an important issue that is covered ad nauseum, sure.
For an issue that was hot today but not next week, I hard disagree. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585287
One simple example: The FBI raided my friend's workplace. All the news reported the business as having shut down permanently. Yet my friend worked there for at least 4 years! He said they shut down for a few days max.
For smaller stories, talk to people involved, and you'll get an idea of how inaccurate they can be.
They said usually. There's also no alternative as it's great for this one situation you had insight but the vast majority of people don't.
And I'm saying it's "usually" only for major stories that have continued coverage.
For the rest (which may be close to the majority), I'm saying "No".
> There's also no alternative as it's great for this one situation you had insight but the vast majority of people don't.
I've had insight in a number of unrelated events that were covered by journalists. Each time they get important details wrong.
There is an alternative. Don't trust the articles on these stories.
What's the alternative that is reasonable?
Is trust binary?
I think that Republicans push mistrust of the media to eliminate any sources of information besides their own representatives
I think you and I have had wildly different experiences.
If I know something about what is in the paper, it’s rare that the paper is correct. It’s almost always missing some critical piece of information, or wildly misrepresenting the situation to attempt to simplify it to the point your average person will read the article.
On a related note, everyone should know about Gell-Mann amnesia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
That is the technicality here. Bullshit is getting spewed, but in most cases, direct falsehoods aren't gett reported. If you quote someone saying something untrue, the paper didn't present a falsehood, same with bias, omission, emphasis and misleading narratives or framings. If you avoid stating facts and just cite sources, you can maintain, that the media outlet didn't lie. But only in the limited technical sense of direct commission.
Recent Wikipedia articles are kind of an oxymoron; Wikipedia by design is meant to be a tertiary source, downstream of both news media but also mainstream scholarship. The problem is that it's "an encyclopaedia anyone can edit" — and that inherently means a rush to create or update articles when news outlets publish something novel.
While news media is an acceptable source, proper peer-reviewed journals and other scientific publications are preferred. People would do well to remember Wikipedia is NOTNEWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...).
I find the source collating of Wikipedia helpful for recent events. That's when you're going to get most editor interest to improve the page and readers to consume it.
Yeah basing articles on scholarly books is good, but not every topic will be covered and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AThe_deadline_is_no...
Not every topic will be covered yet. While *The deadline is now* is an essay, *WP:NOTNEWS* is policy — and inherent in an encyclopedia.
Yeah WP:NOTNEWS is policy, and it starts with
> In principle, all Wikipedia articles should contain up-to-date information. Editors are also encouraged to develop stand-alone articles on significant current events.
There clearly is editor and reader interest in making decent quality articles on major current events. Yes they may contain errors that the history book on topic won't contain, but I still think it's worth having. Just mind the things to avoid listed in WP:NOTNEWS and I think we will be fine
And I don't think everything will ever be covered in a book. There is not an infinite amount of scholars studying every random significant event. And those will probably use the same news articles as one of their sources anyway.
Wikipedia isn't aiming for an objective truth. That barely exists, but a common understanding. See this essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...
Wikipedias aim is to collect information not tell us the truth. It’s a mirror not a light. News articles are a source of information because they can be verified. For every claim where news articles have gotten wrong, there are 100x times “relevant sources” getting it wrong.
I'm not sure that the media lately has been 100x times more accurate than a Ouija board, but I'm going to ignore that for now.
The point here isn't that the media is accurate or not. The point is they focus on the attention grabbing events not the important ones. There are basic metrics about the world which completely invalidate many political beliefs of both parties. Those are rarely if ever reported.
For example: - only 7% of the US economy is involved in international trade - renewables have a .1 (10%) capacity factor which means anytime they are used for baseload, they will never pay back the carbon produced in their manufacturing - Mississippi's per capita GDP is about the same as Germany's
Facts like these are rarely reported because they show how irrelevant most of what is reported truly is. That's the point.
Your personal opinions and conclusions aren’t facts, you cite the “basic metrics” from a reputable source and Wikipedia will accept it. It doesn’t have to be a news article. Many of examples that you gave don’t stand a cursory scrutiny of being “facts”. Wikipedia has multitude of information citing basics metrics about the world.
This has been a problem since Wikipedia's existence. I've had the (mis)fortune of personally knowing people who were charged with serious crimes - serious enough to garner nationwide attention.
The stuff that got printed in the news was at times just plain false. Stuff that anyone in our town could easily confirm to be false. A reporter would hear something wrong, or interview one person who misspoke, and (s)he would never fact check. Eventually those inaccuracies would end up not just in Wikipedia, but in books written by experts on the case in hand.
Even recently, my company has been in the news a lot (negative news). You'll get stories where anonymous employees are telling journalists things about changes in the company. A lot of it is flat out wrong.
My father in law was a fixture in the city newspaper coverage for many years. The facts are usually reliable or refined as a story develops. The narrative is not -- as the people talking to reporters always have an axe to grind, be it ego, resentment, moral outrage, revenge, etc. Bigger stories are usually better if there's some baseline.
For example, a government story that can be baselined by an audit, report or some proceeding is usually more reliable than a scoop.
> It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth.
Wikipedia is arguably worse than the sloppiest news slop the media machine can manufacture. It's lawless, it's been shown majority of articles are written and edited by a single cabal of people, and it's also been shown a distinct bias towards one side of the political aisle.
I wouldn't trust Wikipedia any more than anything Rupert Murdoch owns. Perhaps slightly less, because at least in theory Murdoch can be held accountable for fake news and Wikipedia is powered entirely by fake news and accountable to literally no one.
What should they do instead? Any source can wrong.
If you cite a news article a person should be able to use that to locate additional sources.
I don't know for certain, but I believe it's because newpapers (aka "The Press") are at risk of libel or slander charges if they don't get their facts straight. That may also be a US-centric thing, too, I am not sure. To put a pin on it, we want to believe that the possibility of punishment for misrepresenting facts imposes some level of accountability on a print publication.
Still, despite the fact that they can be sued for lying by the people they are lying about, I'm sure they find plenty of ways to bend the truth while still technically telling it.
I suppose that calls into question why we trust any media source that we can't directly verify ourselves as an authority. It's all very confusing to me, to be honest and I simply don't know what to do about it. Not being able to trust information is maddening.
News is, by definition, unusual. If you consume it to learn about unusual events then it can be alright. If you use it to build a picture about common events, you're going to end up with a completely upside down picture.
My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
> The phrase man bites dog is a shortened version of an aphorism in journalism that describes how an unusual, infrequent event (such as a man biting a dog) is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence with similar consequences (such as a dog biting a man.)
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.
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.
Nobody wants to hear the kids are dead because the moron parents forgot to lock their own pool gate or because they got wasted behind the wheel. They want to hear the evil inanimate objects or drug dealers did it, someone other than the parents.
Risk management is on a scale.
You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.
As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.
It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.
We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract, but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds, and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence for harm in young children.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2301804
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.
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-sh...
I've heard of school districts doing simulated shootings with BB guns, masked men going through the halls to shout at the students, etc. That seems like needlessly frightening theater for no real gain (and might confuse the students ,at that )
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.
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.
1. Death isn’t preventable. We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of another cause of death. Sure it might extend your life a little bit, but I feel it’s entirely rational to seek out information on causes of immediate death as more relevant than causes of long term death. The probability of living much older than 100 is virtually nil. Probably good to have information on both though.
2. It’s possible they are major causes of early death, but I can’t figure that out from the article and it would be nice if the article provided that information.
> We will all die, so if you prevent one cause of death in old age, you will just die of another cause of death.
I can tell you're quite young :-)
Old age is pretty broad, and you really need to start worrying at some point in your 40s. Although death due to these is rare at that age, you'll likely end up knowing 1-3 people who will die of these at that age. And a lot more in the 50s.
There's a huge difference between dying in your 60s (perhaps right before retirement), and dying in your 80s. Lumping all of these people into "old age" is likely a byproduct of the same biases that cause journalism to not report on it.
Although we should remember that “old age” is long. Someone can die at 72 from heart disease and people might just call that dying of old age when that person could have easily lived another decade or two if they made different lifestyle choices. That would be more of an “early death” than a centenarian dying in a car accident. The suddenness is irrelevant.
Would you rather die by heart attack, cancer, or misadventure?
Chances are, one of the three is going to happen. The longer you live, the more the first two are likely.
Death by misadventure is possible at any point however!
Fatal heart disease is in fact primarily age related.
Age and health feed into a ton of the top killers.
Diet and exercise reduces the risks of a lot of health related deaths.
It really is simple math for most people. Reduce your calories, limit your salt, and eat more vegetables.
> limit your salt
There's some dissention as to whether this actually helps lengthen life for most people (the salt myth). You shouldn't ignore your doctor, but neither should you blindly accept poor science.
> There's some dissention
Yeah, that always happens. There's people that think you should only eat fruit or that coffee enemas are the way to perfect health.
But the fact remains that there are multiple studies with strong links of higher sodium intake to heart attacks. Further, globally pretty much all major medical organizations (especially in countries with well functioning health systems) agrees on limiting salt intake.
There will always be a few studies that show that "actually you should eat 20g of salt a day!" and to me, that is the bad science.
The medical consensus by both studies and the experts is that you should limit salt. Telling someone "but those studies were all bad" doesn't convince me that the counter studies are good, but instead convinces me that the counter studies were likely flawed. If there were more studies that reinforced the bad studies, that might be something to talk about. But as it stands, we have just a noisy minority (suspiciously selling books...) that is making a claim without the significant studies to back their media tours.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9174123/
Stipulate that, and fatal heart disease is still in fact primarily age related.
Right. But what age it happens at can (often) be shifted.
Same for stroke, kidney disease, diabetes, cancer. Those all usually hit older ages and have an age-related component, the risk of them at any age group is reduced by diet and exercise. Those two things can be true.
Of course there are outliers in each.
The claim was "heart disease is not primarily age related". This is a thread about causes of death. If we interpret that claim as "fatal heart disease is not primarily age related", it's straightforwardly false.
Though age also indexes the area under the curve of lifetime exposure to the risks, so it becomes a trivial claim to say that it's age related since it's one of the two axes.
If you have a heart attack at age 50 but with lifestyle intervention (or PCSK9 loss-of-function genetics) you instead would have had it at age 90, then "primarily age-related" is an insufficient claim in this thread.
And I did not dispute your claim, I added to it.
Age is the primary factor and health is generally the secondary factor. Both contribute.
> heart disease is primarily not age-related
Uh... it absolutely is? Not sure what you're trying to say here. All progressive diseases, including heart disease (cancer too) are going to be "age related" simply because they take time to develop.
And plaque-related heart disease, the big killer, takes a long time to develop. The statistics are really clear here. People under 30 simply don't die of congestive heart failure absent one of a handful of very rare disorders. It starts to show up in middle age and really takes off after 70.
They are preventable, sure. They are "early" deaths in that the sufferer would die before something else got them. But they absolutely skew toward the elderly. Heavily.
I wonder what has a bigger impact on longevity, lifestyle choices or being a multi-millionaire with access to the best healthcare.
Just doing a quick check on this, lifestyle choices slightly edges out net worth.
Living what is called a "low-risk" lifestyle (don't drink, don't smoke, maintain healthy weight, avoid junk food) results in an average life expectancy of 90 (93 for women, 87 for men), compared to being in the top 1% which results in a life expectancy of 87 (86 for men, 88 for women).
The overall average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 (76 for men, 81 for women).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4866586/
https://www.abom.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Impact-of-He...
Lifestyle choices have a far larger impact on average. The big gains in lifespan (and healthspan) come from delaying the onset of chronic disease rather than treating it after it occurs.
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.
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.
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.
You should also weight those with how practically attainable they are.
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.
Hahaha, huh?
If you have access to the best healthcare you definitely don’t wait in the same queues. You have direct access to the specialists, often at the best teaching hospitals too.
If you have Medicare, good luck.
I don't know what you think "direct access to specialists" is.
I have concierge medicine. I have two specialist appointments scheduled both take about 3mo.
I can see my PCP within 1 day. That is good. I can have blood drawn within 1 day. That's good.
Specialists, no advantage. This makes it not overly valuable, but what do you expect for 8k extra for year (on top of very good health care)?
I don't know how to access a higher tier of health. Perhaps at 100M+ of net worth it appears. IDK.
Like Stanford pulmonologist in less than a week for an asthma eval.
Meanwhile, my Mom waited months on Medicare for a heart eval due to arrhythmias.
Whatever plan you have, it doesn’t sound top tier?
This didn’t require high net worth, just a better plan through an employer - or you’re in an area with low specialist populations? Or some sort of low priority on a triage schedule?
If you have mm net worth, the specialists come to you - quickly - unless you really need the .001% specialist. and chances are you they don’t and it’s not worth it.
But even Kaiser had no issues giving less than a week access for anything important.
Avoiding an early death is a lifelong commitment to health. Knowing what the greatest dangers are helps direct your actions in support of that.
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?
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
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'.
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.
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 ...)
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.
People believe that we can prevent and pacify terrorism because it comes from a belief system that we disagree with. Diabetes is just caused by the instinct of eating.
Also people don't really "see" diabetes, news don't show picture of sick livers, people don't understand the science of it. Terrorism is easier to represent compared to diabetes.
Also people believe that we can stop being a terrorist. But we can't decide what happens in our liver.
Another big difference is that you can fight terrorism with the military, but not diabetes. So it's less entertaining and less "concerning".
>> 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
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.
Dumb Ways to Die, so many dumb ways to die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw
I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or driving drunk!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Absolutely insane that this article doesn't recognize that there is a human interest difference in untimely death, and poor health and old age.
There is a whole section in the article about that.
It gets close to dancing around my point, but the article actually doesn't mention old age at all.
The article insinuates that we don't care about heart disease, because heart disease is boring and common.
But death is a lot more complicated of an issue to society than this. Society expects that a young healthy person in the prime of their life is going to be around for their family and their friends. Other people are probably counting on them to still exist tomorrow. By contrast when an elderly person has been suffering on their deathbed with dementia for 10 years, and dies of heart disease, it's so much different situation for society, that person may not have many friends or family left, and they may not be able to interact with them, even if they are alive for another year. And the friends and family they have left may have been going through the grieving process for years already.
Society does not see all deaths as equal things no matter the circumstance. And so it's silly for this article to pretend that the only thing different between any of these deaths is the cause listed on the death certificate.
That section implies that news sources report on this because otherwise customers wouldn't be entertained enough to keep paying. The piece doesn't really engage with the argument you're responding to.
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.
It's not the responsibility of news organizations to educate people. Health education should probably come from our educational institutions.
The statistics on the left hand in the article, unfortunately, have conflated preventable deaths with unpreventable deaths. While some of them made people preventable, we really have no clue how many. However, every single non-preventable death is included in that column. Talk about bias...
[dead]
Well said, i was looking for someone who felt like i did after reading the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
But when the outliers create an impression that is a falsehood - like that cities are intrinsically dangerous because of extreme levels of violent crime because violent crime is what gets reported?
People hit by cars are no less dead.
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.
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.
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-hopk...
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.
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
Easy to say when you're not yet the old sick person
Yes it is, it's called planning-ahead for the extremely predictable.
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.
There are quite a lot of hyphens in this younger than open access to LLM models account’s posts.
"Too many hyphens!" is definitely the dumbest insult I've ever seen for someone digging through a comment history, holy shit.
/shrug
Its more like AI has made content from accounts created after 2022-2023 difficult to trust even more than the previous error of bots. Its like how nuclear tests made all steel not sourced from shipwrecks have too high of radiation to be used for high sensitivity radiation detectors
lol, I upset you that much?
depends what the sickness is I guess
If I get alzheimers or dementia and there's no cure at that point.. yeah I'm out
My understanding is that in places where this isn't specifically allowed, pain medication is increased in a wink-wink kind of way when the time comes
>afraid that suicide will send them to hell, as if God wouldn't understand
i wish God were real and listening to this; he would smite you dead rite here rite now for your arrogance, mortal
well I guess I just proved your God isn't real, sorry fsckboy
The news shows us what's unusual, not what's most dangerous to us.
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.
The most common way to die is, by definition, not news.
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
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.
To ensure they're destabilising?
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!
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.
Are there actually only 16 deaths caused by terrorists? Don't they have mass shootings every week?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I think we should have a heart week. I'm sure they could make this scary in order to promote cardio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
Exactly what came to mind for me as well. Information is a difference that makes a difference.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
"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.
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.
What a dumb article, diseases are self-inflicted/random, no one cares.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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..
wrong thread
thanks %
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)
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)
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).
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.
> 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.
All I can offer in response is what Dr. Offit said: "In 1991 there were roughly 30,000 in children less than 10 years of age who got hepatitis B in this country. Half of them got it from their mothers. The other half got it from relatively casual contact um with from people who had chronic hepatitis B virus and didn't know it. How many people in the US are infected with hepatitis B virus? Do we know? Yes. So it's tens of thousands every year. And then in terms of how many are chronically infected, about a little over 2 million."
I recognize that big pharma has a ton of problems and questionable practices. But Dr. Offit's statement "The other half got it from relatively casual contact um with from people who had chronic hepatitis B virus and didn't know it." suggests that being born to moms w/o hep B is not without risk particularly given the outsize risk for cancer.
Excellent post, and thank you for sharing.
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.
I’m surprised at 1 in 50 deaths being suicide
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.
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.
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!
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.
>...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.
This is an overgeneralization. You are far more likely to die in a C172 airplane than you are in a modern car.
First, one doesn't need to be impaired to die from a drunk driver. Only ~60% of the people who die in DUI accidents are the impaired driver. You can do everything right, but you're constantly surrounded by people making mistakes. You are not alone on the road. And even then, nearly 70% of traffic fatalities did not involve any impairment!
You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.
Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.
(warning: pdf) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/public/publication/8135...
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.
Media is simply the attempt to capture your life minutes and exchange them for advertising dollars.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
If journalists deliver an inaccurate view of the world through their work, they should be criticized for it.
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.
Raw data website for people who are interested in getting their own opinion: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-ag... Discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584294
Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was. Most people don't talk about it because as with everything (NFL halftime shows, restaurant logos, etc) in my quickly-regressing country, COVID is a topic that inflames passions.
> A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was.
I don't know what country you're referring to, but there's ample data that it's highly partisan in the USA, and you, too, might be misinformed. In particular, the political left wildly overestimates the lethality of Covid (both historically and in the present). See, for example [1]. Other sources [2,3] reporting on the same data also validate the overall partisanship, but unfortunately don't show the correct answer in a way that makes it easy to see the pattern.
[1] https://www.allsides.com/blog/partisan-divide-among-republic...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-misinformation-is-dis...
[3] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
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.
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.
>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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
One of the most informative and eye opening articles I found on HN. Thanks for posting.