41–50 of 57 posts
The amount of violence in the stories we watch is astounding; I wonder if that doesn't influence peoples perceptions much more than the news does.
try counting how many times in the last week you saw a gun being drawn (on TV/Netflix/hulu).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's just the nature of journalism and headlines. It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth , to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding. If lots of people end up thinking men biting dogs is a bigger problem than dogs biting men, they've failed at that. They really ought to put up some kind of corrective explanation (sort of like the NYT's disclosures of…
Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs. When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like rep…
I think regular "general disclaimers and PSAs" and necessary to 1) reinforce and refresh the proper lessons and 2) give them to people who never had the proper lessons in the first place.
The first leftmost column of most common causes of death (heart disease, etc) ... would be a "dog bites man" story. The rightmost columns of media coverage (homicides, terrorism, plane crashes, etc) ... are "man bites dog" stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog It's just the nature of journalism and headlines. E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..." But the…
While the image itself is interesting, and indeed points out one of the reasons I don’t watch/read the news from mass media, there are two problems I find with the (clickbait) title: 1. “Manipulation” suggests that outlets are leading people to believe these ratios of causes of deaths, when in fact, they’re just reporting on what they think viewers find more interesting (basically unnatural over natural causes of dea…
I also tend to agree with 1, but that’s the actual problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to call it clickbait. The news media shouldn’t be reporting what they think viewers will find interesting, they should be giving an accurate picture of what is happening. We all know how, for example, YouTube’s and Facebook’s engagement algorithms turn your online world into echo chambers. The traditional media has the same problem when they chase engagement at the expense of the whole truth.
For sure there’s a balancing act necessary. The media of course can’t ignore what people want, but they can choose to be a force for truth and still have a viable business. They can choose not to dramatically overexaggerate things that don’t affect us, and they can choose to sprinkle doses of reality and boring stuff amid the drama.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's just the nature of journalism and headlines. It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth , to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding. If lots of people end up thinking men biting dogs is a bigger problem than dogs biting men, they've failed at that. They really ought to put up some kind of corrective explanation (sort of like the NYT's disclosures of…
Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs. When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like rep…
Just because an article mentions terrorism doesn't mean that terrorism is being covered as a cause of death. Terrorism could be covered wrto. its economic impact.
Same with the flu. The article could be on vaccines.
All these causes of death have so many other newsworthy impacts, so a better comparison would exclude coverage of these causes in the context of their other impacts.
I don't think the general sentiment would necessarily be much different, though. You may very well find that "mass silent killers" get less airtime than other types of news.
While the image itself is interesting, and indeed points out one of the reasons I don’t watch/read the news from mass media, there are two problems I find with the (clickbait) title: 1. “Manipulation” suggests that outlets are leading people to believe these ratios of causes of deaths, when in fact, they’re just reporting on what they think viewers find more interesting (basically unnatural over natural causes of dea…
Agreed on 2, this problem predates what we call social media. I also tend to agree with 1, but that’s the actual problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to call it clickbait. The news media shouldn’t be reporting what they think viewers will find interesting, they should be giving an accurate picture of what is happening. We all know how, for example, YouTube’s and Facebook’s engagement algorithms turn your online world…
I don’t get the impression this is the message they’re intending to deliver. I believe they report on individual stories of homicide and terrorism because it’s more interesting to the public, thus will gain more viewership.
To be clear, I’m not saying mass media isn’t manipulative — in fact, I think they are responsible for much of the misinformation being shared and believed by so many, particularly when it comes to politics.
But if we’re just talking about statistics on the cause of death, I don’t believe they want us to believe homicide/terrorism causes more deaths than heart disease/cancer.
The world has changed a lot in the past hundred years. People don't really die violent deaths at the hands of others much any more. Journalism has failed to keep up, and images like this show that very clearly.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. News content, just like all other content, is tracked and analyzed for engagement. Publishers want to create content that people want to engage with, and we see over and over again that people prefer content that elicits a reaction. Also, news subscriptions are now seen as a luxury good and not an essential need. Who wants to pay $15/month for a report on how many people died of heart…
This is so strange to me. It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon. No one cares that the morning commute's traffic is just as it was the day before and the day before that, but they do care that an accident shut down the main highway. It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual. At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time hu…
News organizations could report on people dying of extremely rare diseases and these are rarely reported on compared to terrorism/homicide.
Rarity is not the best predictor of whether a news organization will cover something. "Likelihood of engagement/rage/shock/fear/anxiety" is the best predictor of story coverage, although this overlaps well with "uncommon happening."
There's absolutely nothing special about news organizations (beyond engaging in 1st amendment activity regularly): they want to make money, they're businesses.