How people die vs. media coverage of death
owenshen24.github.io
How people die vs. media coverage of death
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#2Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#3Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.
It wouldn't make much sense for the news to report on things which were not newsworthy. That people die from very typical things people always die from just isn't news.
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#4They use media coverage and conflate it with "general public sentiment" and how "people think we die". While the wording seems to be carefully crafted that it avoids stating something outright wrong, it does suggest that they are the same.
Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#5Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.
It wouldn't make much sense for the news to report on things which were not newsworthy. That people die from very typical things people always die from just isn't news.
But people have always died from violence. It's hardly news.
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#6Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.
I think the fears of terrorism is less about how many people it kills, as how unsafe it makes people feel.
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#7Cf. xkcd #1468 How worried you should be when various things happen to you in movies vs. real life.
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#8Wow, terrorism really is overrepresented compared with how we die these days. I wonder if that's some kind of evolutionary echo of a more violent time when a leading cause of death for most humans was regional strife. We're apparently still pretty interested in who's out there somewhere, scheming to come and kill us.
I think the fears of terrorism is less about how many people it kills, as how unsafe it makes people feel.
And how useful that feeling is to manipulate for media companies.
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#9Hey everyone,
I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction!
I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process.
^_^
Re: How people die vs. media coverage of death
#10They use media coverage and conflate it with "general public sentiment" and how "people think we die". While the wording seems to be carefully crafted that it avoids stating something outright wrong, it does suggest that they are the same. Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?
There are! The most famous one is this one https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794... and the results are largely in-line w/ what one might expect.
> Two kinds of bias were identified: (a) a tendency to overestimate small frequencies and underestimate larger ones, and (b) a tendency to exaggerate the frequency of some specific causes and to underestimate the frequency of others, at any given level of objective frequency