
Does the news reflect what we die from? - okket
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from
======
owenshen24
Hey HN, I'm the lead person who did the original data collection. We were
previously featured when I made the initial site here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16840237)

Happy to answer more questions people might have about methodology or the
analysis in the original study.

~~~
olau
I know this is perhaps besides the point: but I'm surprised that traffic
incident reporting is so low - but then aren't you scraping more intellectual
news media than what I would imagine most people would be reading? Not very
familiar with the English/American news situation.

~~~
Arnt
You can do a low-quality check easily. Read some medium that you suspect will
be different from NYT/G for a week and count how many traffic accidents were
reported in a particular locale, and how many reports there were for each.
Then call the police and ask how many there actually were in that week.

I can guess what you'll find: What's chosen for reporting is news or otherwise
noteworthy events. Traffic accidents may be a cause of death, but that doesn't
make them either news or noteworthy. Traffic jams and their causes are an
everyday occurence, even if the cause involves someone being driven off in an
ambulance.

------
theobon
The most interesting tidbit for me was how similar the news breakdown was
between the two sources: New York Times and The Guardian. The largest
deviation was 3.4% for suicide coverage but almost everything was within 1%.

Perhaps these examples are too similar to get a good distribution but if news
organizations are all covering basically the same items perhaps there is an
opportunity for differentiation. The google search trends shows that what
people are interested in knowing doesn't match what media is interested in
telling.

~~~
ineedasername
I wish they had chosen a different, or a third source though. I rate NYT & The
Guardian (though both of decent quality) as fairly similar in editorial
outlook.

------
randyrand
The news reflects what we're _interested_ in. Most deaths aren't interesting.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
This makes me ponder: The human brain is wired to be interested in novel,
relatively unusual things. So, almost by definition, this implies humans are
wired to be relatively disinterested in truth. :/

~~~
cortesoft
This has a common term in the news industry: Man Bites Dog

Since 'newsworthy' is synonymous with 'unusual', we end up thinking rare
things are actually common, since we only cover rare things in the news.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog_(journalism)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog_\(journalism\))

------
ternaryoperator
This data is based on causes of death defined purely physically. It's a shame
that in a world as complex as ours, we still don't attach psychological
explanations and categorize them as causes too. Why not: he died of
loneliness? He died of a broken heart? Or economic ones: He died because he
couldn't afford the healthcare he needed? He died because he couldn't pay the
heating bill and they turned it off?

Perhaps then we could get a different handle on the issues that face us,
especially that face the elderly, and be more responsive.

~~~
mpweiher
Considering your first two, loneliness and broken heart, these would probably
fall under suicide, which is 1.8%.

So I am not sure you'd be getting a significant new insight into major causes.

~~~
ternaryoperator
We don't know, because suicide is the only category on the chart that reflects
a psychological factor. If we tracked (more correctly, if we could track)
people dying of loneliness but who don't commit suicide, perhaps we'd find the
number to be hugely higher. When I look at the sadness of the elderly in large
cities, my sense is that number would be a lot higher. But we just don't know.

~~~
slimsag
To some extent we do know. We know people who are lonely tend to be less
active, and we know people who are less active tend to have worse health.

On the Greek island of Ikaria for example[1], we know that people regularly
live to be 90 years old and that even at that age they remain incredibly
social and physically active.

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171116-the-greek-island-
wi...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171116-the-greek-island-with-the-key-
to-longevity)

------
INTPenis
I think this is a great article because it yet again shows how news are only
there for terrify and manipulate.

Perhaps not always conscious, because they need their jobs and their jobs are
to fill a 24 hour cycle with news.

And nobody wants to hear about cancer and heart disease, it bums them out.

~~~
randyrand
news is mainly for entertainment.

~~~
dylan604
But it's not. Sheeple/masses have been trained into that concept, but Edward
Murrow is probably rolling in his grave at the fact. Have you spent time with
reporters, specifically TV? The real newsies hate doing the fluff stories, or
the must carry by their corporate owners. They want to just do the news. Of
course, there are the ones that are just hoping to be the next entertainment
star as you have accept news programming to be.

------
dawhizkid
Hm. Should the news reflect what we die from...?

Glaring omission is deaths from airplane crashes. I would guess that is the
most disproportionately covered of any cause of death.

I'm also skeptical of the data on drug overdoses. Seems like the opioid
epidemic is pretty well-covered these days but listed as only .4% of "Media
Coverage" and 1.3% of searches.

~~~
megaremote
If the news does to proportionally show what we die from, then we all focus on
the wrong areas, and vote in politicians who come up with solutions to the
wrong areas.

For me, the most likely way I have of dying is a car hitting me. Heart disease
is not an issue for me as I exercise every single day and eat, and cancer is
not a concern as I do the above and anything else will not affect it
significantly.

~~~
dylan604
> Heart disease is not an issue for me as I exercise every single day and eat,
> and cancer is not a concern as I do the above and anything else will not
> affect it significantly.

If only it were that simple. Yes, exercise greatly decreases the risk of
certain things as a healthy body is just that much more resilient. However,
please get yourself checked at your regular 10k, 20k, 30k miles. Life happens
in funny ways. Don't be an edge case. Also, if you live in California, you
have to be super careful of all the cancer causing things that are only known
to the state of California.

------
0898
Every year in the United States, 225,000 people die iatrogenic deaths.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, iatrogenesis is
the third largest cause of death in the United States after heart disease and
cancer.

Iatrogenic. What is that word? Is it a disease, an accident, or something you
get from smoking?

In fact iatrogenic means inadvertent death caused by a doctor or a hospital.

Why don’t they just say that? I guess it isn’t exactly in medicine’s best
interests to put it in simple language that anybody can understand.

------
mxfh
The oddest one are road deaths to me at 4x below cancer, apparently taken for
granted at any stage of life, but mostly avoidable with some policy changes.

~~~
dudul
You make it sound very trivial to reduce road deaths. Which policy changes do
you have in mind?

~~~
umvi
Crack down harder on DUI. DUI kills more innocents than guns.

~~~
s1artibartfast
I'm skeptical that harsher DUI penalties are the appropriate solution. Most
states already have significant DUI penalties, and think that increasing them
is largely a PR move. Drunk drivers are involved in about 20% of fatal
accidents, leaving 80% to other causes[1]. About 30% of fatal accidents
involve speeding [2]. Perhaps we should consider similar penalties for
speeding as for DUI. Drunk drivers do kill more "innocents" than guns, but
also keep in mind that very few gun deaths are innocents. 97% of gun deaths
are homicide or suicide [3]

[https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812630)

[https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017-DCA15SS002-B...](https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017-DCA15SS002-BMG-
statement-o.pdf)

[https://www.vox.com/future-
perfect/2018/12/11/18135976/gun-d...](https://www.vox.com/future-
perfect/2018/12/11/18135976/gun-deaths-us-2017-suicide)

~~~
petschge
The deterrence effect is a function of both the severity of the punishment and
its certainty. And while the punishment for driving drunk is already
substantial (maybe even too high), the risk of getting caught is not that
large. An effective (but maybe not efficient) crack-down would therefore aim
to increase the risk of getting caught and punished.

~~~
leetcrew
do you have any ideas for cracking down on drunk driving that wouldn't
inconvenience and intimidate law-abiding citizens? the only methods I can
think of are checkpoints and large-scale surveillance, both of which I would
oppose.

~~~
petschge
I don't. Which is why I called a non-efficient solution. A theoretical
solution would be to require ignition interlocks on all new vehicles. Not that
I am advocating for that. A more realistic solution should focus more on
officers observing and punishing bad driving, including all the effects of
driving drunk or with cellphone in hand.

~~~
leetcrew
I could certainly support cops focusing more on reckless driving (tailgating,
weaving, no-signal lane changes). if a cop sees a driver doing something
unsafe with their own two eyes, I have no problem with them making a stop. I
bet they would actually end up catching a decent number of drunk drivers this
way.

------
team-o
Natural deaths seem less newsworthy to me than unnatural deaths.

~~~
ddxxdd
Agreed. The purpose of the news is to hold our government accountable, and
mitigating kidney disease is not a fundamental part of governance.

~~~
kraftman
The purpose of news is to inform about current events, not specifically for
holding the government accountable.

------
pdm55
I heard an ICU physician say that here in Australia a cause of death must be
put on the death certificate and that the usual choice is "myocardial
infarction" (heart attack). Whereas a better choice might be simply "old age",
but this is not an acceptable cause. So I guess that this is one of the
reasons why "heart attack" is listed as the most common cause of death.

~~~
vagab0nd
Why is "old age" a better choice? Usually there's some kind of a disease that
can't be handled by the aging body. Is it because it's not worth it to
identify what the disease is?

~~~
Retra
A whole chain of things need to happen for you to die, but they typically
culminate in starving the brain of nutrients or oxygen. That usually happens
due to organ failure, and that can certainly be the eventual consequence of
old age. So tying 'cause of death' to a single factor is almost always a gross
oversimplification. There are many causes for every death, and it's only
important to look at specific ones should you care to prevent them or assign
blame for them.

------
tych0
I agree that we cover terrorism too much in the news.

However, if you look at the date ranges for what is arguably the most
important graph in the post:
[https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/10/Causes-of-
death-v...](https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/10/Causes-of-death-vs-
media-coverage.png)

They run from 1999-2016 for both the news organizations, and from 2004-2016
for the Google searches. 9/11 happened in 2001, so of course there were going
to be lots of articles about that, and less searches if you exclude that time
period.

The deaths were selected from 2016 alone, which is maybe reasonable, but then
why select articles from a range of years elsewhere? Certainly there were more
deaths in 2001 from terrorism than any other year in this range, so excluding
it from some things while including it in others seems like an act of Hanlon
if nothing else.

~~~
maxwell
Worth checking out their data on terrorism:

[https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism](https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism)

Particularly outside North America:

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-terrorism-
fatal...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-terrorism-fatalities-
by-region)

------
mevile
A pattern I noticed is that media coverage is biased towards the things that
kill us that we don't have as much control over.

I imagine people know heart disease is a huge killer but they also know they
can make lifestyle changes to prevent it and they know what those changes need
to be.

~~~
reallydude
> biased towards the things that kill us that we don't have as much control
> over.

It's not about what we have control over, but what we have information about.
Informed consent is the bedrock of western society, from the enlightenment
period. I suspect fear mongering (and terrorism) is effective precisely
because westerners are trained to define unknowns and mitigate danger.

Some go so far as to be outraged that someone hasn't preternaturally predicted
how an unknown could have been dealt with.

------
andrewla
This entire analysis is predicated on ignoring tail risk. Most causes of death
are pretty normal events; if we took no measures to prevent any of them then
chances are most of them would increase by very small amounts; maybe doubling
for the most dramatic cases.

Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left
unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no
realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause. The lack of
deaths is not a function of desire on the part of terrorists to cause death,
but just their ability to do so.

In some ways this is similar to the reaction to nuclear power -- even though
practically speaking it is very safe, if it were to go wrong, it could got
wrong on a scale that is not really possible for almost any other source of
energy. Regulations and safety practices can go a long way towards mitigating
this, but the tail risk remains a huge unknown, not in the probability sense,
but in the negative impact sense.

~~~
Isamu
>Terrorism is especially terrifying in this regard because if left
unrestrained, I think it is pretty intuitively obvious that there is no
realistic bound on the amount of deaths that it would cause.

I think you rebut this one yourself - terrorism has a natural limit in the
ability of terrorists to launch attacks. Not a hard limit, a statistical
limit, but important none the less.

It is important to recognize the order of magnitude of the probability of the
risk. At CERN they don't publicize that there is a long-tail risk of causing
the destruction of the world because the probability, though non-zero, is
exceedingly tiny (and people freak out, unable to think about tiny
probabilities.)

~~~
base698
If a terrorist acquires a nuclear weapon and detonates it in NYC, what happens
to the death rate? The point about tail risk is that probabilities that seem
rare, aren't as rare and defined as you'd hope.

See: Black Swan/Antifragile

~~~
Ygg2
If terrorist detonates a nuke, then it's around a million by some estimates
[1], so even then there is a relatively low ceiling.

But creating and operating a bomb requires expertise, that all terrorist lack.

[1][http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/what-a-nuclear-
attack...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/what-a-nuclear-attack-in-
new-york-would-look-like.html)

~~~
harimau777
A gun style nuclear bomb isn't that complicated. If terrorists were able to
get enriched uranium, then they could probably make one. If there were no
counter-terrorism efforts at all, then there is a reasonable chance that they
would be able to get enriched uranium.

------
charlescearl
The problem that I have with Our World in Data is the how the counting is so
biased AF

As an example

[https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/white/index](https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/white/index)

VS

[https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/black/index.h...](https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2015/black/index.htm)

That is, if you are a Black Male in the US between 15 and 35, yes homicide is
how you are more likely to go. And that news becomes very important to Black
mothers, fathers, grandparents. The real — as in US government stats — on
infant and maternal mortality are also worse than many Caribbean countries.

My takeaway is that there are different “world”s within countries — especially
for marginalized groups where the country doesn’t have the will or resources
for a safety net.

------
chiefalchemist
> "What's interesting is that Americans search on Google is a much closer
> reflection of what kills us than what is presented in the media..."

This is because the key driver of what the mainstream media reports is how
well a given topic will increase the bottomline.

Pardon the editorial, but this is what passes for journalism currently. Sadly
the media drinks their own Kool Aid, believes their own press releases, and
continues to trumpet its own importance, even when the data/evidence
consistently tells otherwise.

~~~
derefr
> This is because the key driver of what the mainstream media reports is how
> well a given topic will increase the bottomline.

Counterpoint: there are news sources that don't have a profit motive, e.g. BBC
News. They still do this same kind of reporting. For them, it's not about
their bottom line. So... what _is_ it about?

~~~
davemp
I'm sure BBC News still has some sort of metrics that it presents to people
for budgeting/promotions.

~~~
derefr
Yes, but the question is, why are these metrics chosen in a way that
incentivizes BBC News reporters to follow exactly the same kind of
sensationalist stories as for-profit news sources?

------
kpwagner
Should media coverage accurately reflect what we die from? I don't think so.
Cause of death is not the only reason to be interested in terrorism, homicide,
and suicide. These charts are eye-candy, and while I respect the work that
went into producing them, I believe they are simply trying to spin a story
instead of addressing the title's topic.

~~~
mr_toad
> Should media coverage accurately reflect what we die from?

People need to be aware that media coverage is disproportionately focused on
certain causes of death.

------
blunte
This is fascinating, but I am greatly disappointed that Foxnews wasn't
included. I would love to see their stacked bar...

~~~
protomyth
It probably wouldn't differ that much from the NY Times. I would also expect
MSNBC to be about the same. Its the angle that is the difference and not so
much the subject. The big networks pretty much fall in line on topics. I think
there was a study posted a long while back here on HN, but it had something to
do with the NYT.

------
rotrux
No. It reflects what we are _worried about_ dying from.

Instead of

<likelihood of thing being in the news> = f(<probability of dying from thing>)

It's more like:

<likelihood of thing being in the news> = f(<probability of dying from thing>)
* g(<scariness of dying from thing>)

~~~
megaremote
But our worries are influenced by what we see on the news.

~~~
rotrux
Yep. Capitalism-induced feedback loop. That said, more people are going to pay
attention to a newscast about terrorism than one about, say, how the yellow
dye used in legal pads is poisonous.

If you think about it, I'm actually more likely to accidentally ingest a legal
pad.

------
olau
There are two parts to terrorism: doing something terrible, and spreading the
word to upset and frighten lots of people.

It's one of the oddities of modern Western societies that you can end up in
jail for donating to what you think is a liberation movement in another
country, but when the New York Times and The Guardian are making money by
doing the second part of terrorism in their home countries, nothing happens.

------
tontonius
Allow me to guess: no. With the simple addition "why would they?"

------
cmenge
meh... \- "Are car reviews watched proportional to car sales?" Seems Ferrari
has really bad sales reps... \- "Do food-related articles reflect what we
eat?" My pasta-with-a-canned-sauce is still waiting to make it to the cover of
Saveur.

------
theandrewbailey
Betteridge's law wins: No.

------
sridca
The corollary is people self-censoring news that does pertain to facts rather
than over-sensationalism. Cf.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519)
|
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052590)

------
newswriter99
I haven't clicked the OP's link but I can already answer with confidence: No.

1-Don't write a headline as a question 2-Don't write a headline with a
question that can be answered "no".

