
Visualizing the Coverage of Deaths in The New York Times vs. Actual Death Data - nemild
https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
======
bogle
But as my mum says when I try to point out she's worrying about the wrong
things, "I don't care what the statistics say, I read about it in the paper
and I believe it's worse." So is it the papers that are distorting reality or
are people wilfully obstinate in their beliefs? (Hint: it's both).

~~~
nemild
I don't think your mom is irrational given what is covered - but the big
mistake we often make is thinking that what we read is _representative_ of
what is going on. I want to use data to show this effect on a number of
issues.

And the larger point I will make in a future post is that news covers what
people want to read, which is problematic if the goal is good decisions.

(As an engineer, I often think about this as akin to sampling bias)

------
nemild
[OP] I spent some time categorizing death coverage in the first pages of The
New York TImes compared to actuality over a 20 month period. I’ve been
intrigued about why so many make threat assessments based on news coverage,
and wanted to see if the “sampling” of news was close to representative.

