I think „manipulation“ may be to strong of a word here, since it assumes intent to manipulate, which is not necessarily to focus on „out of the ordinary“ events. But I think nonetheless that this infographic is interesting and important, because it reminds us that these biases exist and how big they are.
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 disease this month?
The number of people engaging with the news has plummeted in the past couple of decades so if that's the goal they're not doing a very good job.
Also the idea that homicide rates were much higher a century ago is colored by media and entertainment. The graph on the second page of https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1435670/pdf/p... (PDF) shows homicide rates in the 1970s exceeding that of the prohibition era, which itself was a huge spike over pre-prohibition rates.
At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time humanities education did.
If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
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.
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 much more common scenario of "I'm still keeping my social media account active today just like I did yesterday" ... is not submitted -- and nor would it be upvoted to the front page.
Real-life high frequency of normality doesn't make for compelling news.
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 their lawsuit with OpenAI) in a prominent place of most articles that could leave a wrong impression on readers. That shouldn't be much of a problem for the NYT (which I'm most familiar), because its articles tend to be longer with much more background and context than those of its competitor the Wall Street Journal.
When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.
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.
It's incumbent that readers actually want to properly understand the world:
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
(A similar thing is people who learn about interpersonal relationships from dramatic fictional stories with crazy situations and characters, and get the impression this is what "people are like")
I don't think it means that. I think it means that when you are done reading an article about an unusual event, you leave with an understanding of how unusual it is, especially relative to more common comparables.
It's not uncommon for someone to be terrified of violent street crime, terrorism, or school shootings but be totally comfortable with getting in a car and driving long distances. There's something wrong with that outcome.
True enough. I guess with driving it's easier to fool ourselves into thinking we have complete control over our safety.
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 death).
2. The “(social)” feels misplaced. “Social” media, to me, always represents media shared by others, not by news, via sites and apps like TikTok, FB, Instagram, etc. The image only shows news media (though I’m sure this isn’t far from what the distribution also looks like on actual social media).
Social media is responsible for spreading much more misleading/manipulative information than even mass media would report on.
That is, if we saw a chart of how social media manipulated the news, it would be way more exaggerated than this.
Not defending mass media — I just believe social media can be 10x more misleading than what this chart would have us believe (whereas mass media is already terrible.)
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.
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.
Maybe take the derivative over time, draw new graphs, and then we're talking.
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).
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.
ZeroConcerns•2h ago