> And regarding reporting, how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"? Or are you supposed to cover every heart attack on a news story?

No, but you can spend a bit more time on coverage of new findings/research regarding the causes, initiatives and scientific progress towards treatment etc. Sure it isn't sexy but I think there is enough sensationalism to go around to fund some sensible reporting.

What exactly is the point you are making?

It is very reasonable to think that our attention (in the form of editorialized reporting, or funded initiatives) is being spent on actual material problems affecting most people, and this article is claiming this is a gap here... which I, and maybe many others think is valuable.

> how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"?

Until its less of a problem? Like any difficult problem in the world, you can keep coming at it from different ways, use the latest / most effective tools of the day, look for new opportunities, etc, etc.

Otherwise agree, but

>And in most western countries a "school shooting" is nothing a person should even have to think or plan about, and schools don't ever need metal detectors, or to have to plan around such things.

School shootings are still very much a thing where I live (finland), last one being just last year. A country with no guns and supposed to be one of the happiest in the world still experiences them

The causes should be ranked not by body count/percentages, but rather in years of life taken compared to life expectancy. If someone lived to 105 years it doesn't really matter what killed him, if it's at 30 it does.

I think you're burying the lead here.

An important fact is that Americans also think that crime, and specifically violent crime, are on the rise. This is contrary to actual data. So the question are "does news distort our views?" and "does news make us feel more unsafe than we actually are?". Certainly the answer to both is "yes"

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/29/the-link-...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/652763/smaller-majorities-say-c...

> total death factors are not that interesting

And this is why people die from very preventable diseases. News have a social duty to inform the public, when that part is removed all that is left is sensationalist and partisan pieces. And the pubic takes bad decision in their lives based on anecdotal data.

> Everyone of us will die one day

To have so many overweight 40-somethings with sedentary lives is treating live as having no value. People will die some day, but they should be able to enjoy the time that they are alive. Asking people to give up a healthy live because "they will die some time" is just helping big corporations that milk people out of their lives with fatty food, stressful working environments, polluted air, etc.

Do not give up, live is worth living and getting people the information to live good lives is very important.

To me it's interesting that (a) most people die of old age, and (b) the leading cause of death is essentially preventable (heart disease being highly lifestyle related) or else plausibly curable in the future (I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime).

That was very much not the case historically; you can Google numbers yourself but the percentage of childhood deaths prior to modern medicine was truly shocking.

It also seems to indicate that, with some thought and care, a meaningful impact (both at individual and societal levels) is possible by altering our lifestyles to be healthier.

now that i think about it... i think it'd be interesting if the news did a little blurb on 'demographics' along with their reports of other numbers like weather and stock prices.

"this week, the county had X births and Y deaths. the median age rose slightly to Z."

Also thats a much better visualization - thanks for sharing it. Kind of fascinating in a morbid way.

Factors you have control over would be more useful to focus on than inevitable things. I could excuse the media if it focused on things with useful advice on how to reduce your risk in that area.

That and I suspect death where which is random and shocking is much more concerning then deaths that are maybe attributable to semi controllable lifestyle factors.

The new isn't biased towards "sensationalist", it's biased towards unusual.

There's an old saying in newsrooms: nobody cares about a dog bites man story. Everyone will read a man bites dog story.

News reporting is biased towards what's new. If it wasn't, we'd call it olds.

Reporting n more people died from heart disease every day isn't news.

It's like my journalism professor told me since he used to be a news anchor ... "If it bleeds, it leads".

Man...... when did these press companies get so out of touch with reality that they wouldn't even pay respect to the fact that people are actually dying here. So sad.

And the only institution with a mandate to educate and inform just got defunded.

Do you really think it would be informing society if news stations constantly reported the number of cancer deaths that occurred in the last day?

> TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society.

Inform about what? Would you tune in to hear a daily report about how many old people people died of cardiac issues today? I doubt the breakdown here is different for NPR. Or BBC, or whatnot.

It's not a failure of capitalism, it's just what we crave.

> Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of heart disease and cancer.

I think this is the whole point of the article. The news does not cover reality as it is, it selects information that is noteworthy and drives clicks/views/engagement/ad revenue.

This is why the news has been shown to increasingly misrepresent reality:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w32026

> Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account

Age is not evenly distributed across the population. You could just break this down into age brackets and show a chart for each bracket.

> I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss.

The original data does have adjusted statistics similar to this:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db521.pdf

> Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate.

Accidental death is the #3 cause of death. Your level of safety is primarily down to your own actions. Ladders are the most dangerous piece of equipment commonly owned. Murder and random crime are a minor fraction of this category. Suicide is twice as common as murder.

> crime is unpredictable

Types of crime maybe. Location of crime? Almost completely predictable.

You could also just cap it 49 or 54 years old. A lot of medical research does this when looking into things like cancers. It gives a pretty good indication of whats going on during early and prime year without as much longevity bias or 'old age/natural causes' deaths skewing the data. If you make it fully age weighted then you might adjust away things like murder for the 35+ crowd, or overinflate things like SIDS, drowning, and childhood cancers.

City Nerd made a good video on how crime statistics often incorrectly compare to a cities overall safety: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4jG1i7jHSM

In terms of younger people, a really surprising thing I learnt the other day: "for Americans age 18-45, the leading cause of death is fentanyl overdose"

Odd this article doesn't even mention it.. well actually apparently its "4x over-reported"

I believe homicide rate is frequently cited simply because it's the only crime rate that is remotely reliable. Other crimes get underreported but it's hard for the police to ignore a body with a gunshot wound.

Although it would be an interesting chart. But the distinction between what is noteworthy/newsworthy and what actually kills is precisely the point of investigating this topic.

On the other hand, you're most likely to die of heart disease, yet the interventions needed push heart disease well into old age should start as young as possible.

So if you wanted to improve your diet and lifestyle, it makes more sense to first pull the major levers that avoid or postpone your most likely killers before you, say, worry about food dyes.

Yet not even our new HHS seems to understand that.

Same thing happened with COVID.

An overwhelming majority of deaths were the elderly. Weirdly so. Kids (outside of pre existing conditions) were basically immune, better off than the flu.

The “life expectancy loss” metric was much different than raw numbers.

Agreed, this would make for a great standard in mortality metrics.

But almost no 14 year olds get murdered. When you take it as a percent of all 14 year olds, it’s almost nothing. Certainly not an excuse to pull guns from millions of legal owners who have a right to protect themselves no matter how much the media and the left sensationalize it.

It's not about age. It's about deviations from expectations. No newspaper is going to write "grey elephant crosses street" but you can be sure they will report "pink elephant crosses street" because it's unusual.

> For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.

All you're saying is that the news coverage is a reflection of the biases people have (like the one above).

Those last ones reflect the dominant employment sector in each city, right? That seems like what you'd want to see given a lot of viewers will be involved in that kind of news or want updates on it?

> That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

I feel like the right lesson to take from this is that all data sources are coming from a certain perspective and motives, and so you can choose what you want to care about.

Perhaps you don't care about any of that, which is a fine and normal choice. But "this source is biased so I won't consume it" leads, really, to consuming nothing (EDIT: if you go too deep down this route). I think that consuming varying grains of salt is helpful in the general case.

("This source is biased in a specific way that makes me disregard this person's credibility on topics I care about" is a subtly different argument that is valid of course)

>That homework was really what drove home for me that the news is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

I dropped off social media for similar reasons. I didn’t want the outrage of others and hype algorithms dictating what I’d spend time thinking about or reacting to. I wanted to be in control more.

I was fortunate enough to grow up without cable television. Any clip I see from Fox/CNN is usually a bunch of inauthentic, ignorant talking heads that I wouldn’t even trust to tell me the weather.

I’m curious at how many Millennials and younger actually watch the news with any consistency. My sense is it’s mostly older folks that still get their info from TV.

the issue is that this is what people want to watch and so it is even worse for algo feeds.

if you “manage”/editorialize your algorithm to remove these, you’ll be outcompeted in audience share by someone who doesn’t.

Yes, it's filtered, but to a substantial degree it's because that's what the audience wants. If they make money on ads and that revenue depends on eyeball time, then they will want to maximize eyeball time. An exception would be a news org that was funded differently. However that bias while different, would still be present because you only have so many hours in a day and thus can only present things of interest.

> - In New York, it was mostly financial news.

> - In Los Angeles it was mostly entertainment news.

> - In San Francisco it was mostly tech related news

> - In Chicago it was often manufacturing related.

Crazy how well this coincides with the type of billboards you expect to see everywhere in these cities.

So news reports on crime, positive stories, weather, sports, and the dominant industry in the local area.

>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.

This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.

Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.

How is the news doing this?

It’s kinda dumb that Wikipedia still treats newspapers as some sort of ultimate truth. I’ve noticed a couple incidents recently where the news just literally had the facts wrong and the Wikipedia article for the related topic ended up in this weird limbo until the news stories were updated despite more relevant sources being available.

News is, by definition, unusual. If you consume it to learn about unusual events then it can be alright. If you use it to build a picture about common events, you're going to end up with a completely upside down picture.

My general guideline is: the higher up the news hierarchy (local, metro, regional, national, international) a personal risk is, the less you should worry about it. Car crashes barely make the local news most of the time, they're worth some attention and care. Airliner crashes make massive headlines, not worth worrying about. The news is very informative here, you just have to understand what it's really saying.

I get what you're saying but on the flipside, heart disease is primarily not age-related. Something like 80%-90% of cases are preventable through lifestyle choices. And it's the number one cause of death.

Cancer at #2 is more age-related. But that too is fairly preventable. Roughly 50% of cancers are thought to be related to poor lifestyle choices.

Point being - these are major causes of early death.

Avoiding an early death is a lifelong commitment to health. Knowing what the greatest dangers are helps direct your actions in support of that.

What's an early death though? A 98 year old dying of prostate cancer probably isn't, and a 19 year old dying of heart failure probably is, but what about a 55 year old lifetime smoker dying of lung cancer? If a terminally ill 80 year old chooses to end their own life, is that an early death?

There's quite a bit available about that. Search for "Years of Life Lost" or "Years of Potential Life Lost". Or for a quick start - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost

Most lives can be summarised with a birth certificate and a death certificate. For most people, everything that happens between birth and death is not newsworthy by any stretch of the imagination. I count myself in this demographic and this does not mean I live a totally dull and boring life!

You could spend your whole life as the pillar of the community with time for everyone and without an enemy in the world, to live a whole 100 years. Along the way you might have made hundreds of friends and given so much to the world. However, you aren't going to make the news.

Meanwhile, a five year old that gets to meet an nasty brutal end could be in the paper for weeks, with the whole town turning out for the funeral and the whole nation taking note. The five year old would not have lived long enough to 'achieve' anything beyond potty training, yet many words could be written about them.

This is just how the world works. The thing is though, there has been much progress in recent decades on what works for longevity. It is not complicated, you just have to eat mostly plants, get about mostly with your own feet, say hello to people, stay away from the toxic chemicals and keep the old grey cells busy. Accident and communicable disease permitting, you should be able to live longer than your ancestors ever did, with a better 'healthspan'.

If you look at the adverts that pay for the news, everything is working against you. They want to get you to be car dependent and wasting lots of money on highly processed food that slowly gets you. Even by watching the news, you are spending time that could be spent in the company of actual human beings.

If the news was to report on what people do die from, as in the non-communicable diseases that go with car dependency and a high-fat diet devoid of fibre, then they would not be 'advertiser friendly'.

The point is that crime can be up by a factor of 10x and it’s still not significant compared to cancer and heart disease.

And by age. Basically, get some data narrowed down to people in the same group as you, rather than a mix of everyone.

Nobody wants to hear the kids are dead because the moron parents forgot to lock their own pool gate or because they got wasted behind the wheel. They want to hear the evil inanimate objects or drug dealers did it, someone other than the parents.

Risk management is on a scale.

You always try to react to high-probability, high-impact events (traffic accidents at pickup) with rules, controls and people. You may have rules to high-probability, low-impact events (running in the hallway). Low probability, high-impact events are important as well because the stakes are high. Shooter drills and fire drills fall into that category.

As a society, the United States has decided that the value of allowing easy access to firearms is such that risk of marginal people using them to murder children is ok. We've accepted that by default. Depending on how you count, there are several dozen to several hundred school shooting incidents every year.

It would be irresponsible not to have a protocol to protect the lives of children in school, and tbh, the kids accept it as part of life. Those of us who remember a more innocent time are more horrified.

How are they training your children? For mine, it’s basically just “teacher gives a signal, barricade a door, hide in a strongpoint.”

I can’t say it’s anymore serious or traumatizing than earthquake, fire, or tornado drills I grew up on.

Pretty much this, and to add what does not impact our rights. Take freedom of speech for example, self sensoring can lead to a safer albeit "less fulfilling" life, compares to a one where you dissent against the government (saudi arabia, turkey, etc ...)

Hm, but to news readers, how actionable are terrorism-related deaths really?

I would say less than heart disease related ones.

To policy makers, well, terrorism is actionable but so is diabetes. And that while diabetes accounts for a far larger number of deaths.

So I think there is real asymmetry if we look at the data from an “actionable” perspective.

See also

These stupid trucks are literally killing us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo

>> Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable

"Almost half of cancer deaths are preventable" -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02355-x

600,000 people die of cancer per year, 40,000 people die in automobile accidents. Focusing on 40,000 automobile accidents to the exclusion of focusing on 300,000 preventable cancer deaths does not math.

Dumb Ways to Die, so many dumb ways to die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw

I wonder why they didn't start with automobile accidents or driving drunk!

Reporting terrorism also benefits people who want to pass laws restricting peoples freedom or increasing powers of the state.

For heart disease, effective prevention in some patients requires medication such as statins. Exercise and diet are a great start but not always sufficient due to genetics.

Cancer is quite broad. Many of the risk factors such as obesity overlap with heart disease but a lot of patients are still going to randomly get hit regardless of whether they were exposed to certain substances.

Some level of editorializing is always going to be needed to distinguish signal from noise, but to be clear, the point of cable news is to tell you that everything is on fire, all the time. And that’s not because it’s some sort of normative ideal, but rather that the skinner machine figured out that humans watch that stuff more than something more representative of reality.

> Absolutely insane that this article doesn't recognize that there is a human interest difference in untimely death, and poor health and old age.

There is a whole section in the article about that.

Your argument makes sense, but also ignores that people's perception of relative risk is greatly influenced by the news. You indirectly created a bag called "timely death" as if it were "non postponable death".

What I mean is that the time of "timely deaths" can be influenced by human action. If most people die of cancer and heart disease, we should work on avoiding an early death from these causes.

If we can add 2 years of time to our "timely" death of heart disease by eating better, we should do so instead of worrying about terrorism.

Well said, i was looking for someone who felt like i did after reading the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog

But when the outliers create an impression that is a falsehood - like that cities are intrinsically dangerous because of extreme levels of violent crime because violent crime is what gets reported?

People hit by cars are no less dead.

The UK has 2.6 road deaths per 100k people per year. The US has 14.2. The discrepancy is probably mostly driven by this (though the US does also have far lower workplace safety standards).

Part of this is that Americans drive far greater distances, but even adjusted for distance, the US has about twice the deaths per km.

The average American adult travels more than 40 miles per day

https://www.replicahq.com/post/the-average-american-adult-tr...

In the UK, an average car travels 19 miles per day

https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car...

Traffic accidents dominate the fatal accidents category

I'm sure someone has done the math, so I'd be intrigued if anyone can point it out. I'm curious as to the ratio of traffic deaths to driving hours is? It would be even more interesting to see if we had numbers for deaths against "productive" and "leisure" driving hours. Like, we all see the occasional accident, but drive on... So I am not sure the media _needs_ to bring attention to it. As a society, have we just come to accept some deaths as a cost of doing business??? I dunno... just speculating.

We all say this when we don't have to cross this bridge yet. I hope you're as strong as you say you are when that day comes, I'm rooting for you

Easy to say when you're not yet the old sick person

My understanding is that in places where this isn't specifically allowed, pain medication is increased in a wink-wink kind of way when the time comes

>afraid that suicide will send them to hell, as if God wouldn't understand

i wish God were real and listening to this; he would smite you dead rite here rite now for your arrogance, mortal

To ensure they're destabilising?

Media has the follow the money, and for as long as media is paid by advertising, then they have to report on stuff that gets the most salience even if it's proportionally irrelevant.

I think we should have a heart week. I'm sure they could make this scary in order to promote cardio.

That's because all major media outlets in the U.S. are run by the same people.

But by not reporting on things people generally know they end up with skewed knowledge of what they think they know. Thinking that you're going to die of an unlikely cause is generally wrong since it's unlikely, yet talking to younger people that are newsies and they are more likely to think they will die of such rare things.

Exactly what came to mind for me as well. Information is a difference that makes a difference.

Are there actually only 16 deaths caused by terrorists? Don't they have mass shootings every week?

> People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars.

People should be raving to get rid of cars, period. Proper mass transit is always a better option.

Just because cars become self-driving doesn't mean that they are not a negative externality.

> People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars

That's assuming it'll meaningfully reduce the rates of child deaths due to automobiles.

You know what will reduce the rate of child fatality due to automobiles for sure and to an even higher degree? Massively reducing the odds kids and automobiles mix. How do we do that? Have more protected walkable and bikeable spaces. Have fewer automobiles driving around. Design our cities better to not have kids walking along narrow sidewalks next to roads where speed limits are marked as 40 but in reality traffic often flows at 55+.

Its insane to me there are neighborhoods less than a mile from associated public schools that have to have bus service because there is no safe path for them to walk. What a true failure of city design.

wrong thread

You aren't wrong, but you are missing a couple of critical facts. One is that it is vanishingly rare for a baby to get hep b unless it is during birth (from the mother). And we test pregnant women for hep b, so we already know which babies are at risk.

Combining the pool of babies born to mothers with and without hep b for determining risk factors is pretty dishonest. It is done to pad the revenues of large pharma companies. There is a non-zero increase in risk from getting any medicine. We weigh those risks against what the medicine is for. For babies born to mothers without hep b, the best choice is to not vax, for less lucky babies its in the vax category. Ignoring this doesn't improve outcomes. Risk is just complex.

This is not a good rebuttal since it still does not explain why terrorism gets 20,000 times more representation than accidents (which are mostly road traffic accidents).

> why do healthy people die

Except the majority of people in the US at least aren't healthy. So why are we elevating that question to be something that should be discussed nightly when it doesn't affect most people (as shown by death rates by cause)?

That's still a specific choice with wide ranging implications. Not saying we should or shouldn't report on it, but saying your question has pretty deeply ground assumptions on "importance". And it is not a given.

Counterpoint...there were more than 53,000 stabbings in the UK in the same period. I couldn't even find the same stat for the US. When someone wants to be violent, pretty much any heavy or sharp object will do, making things illegal doesn't really change the total amount of violence. You do get less homicides, but more people with life changing injuries. If it wasn't for the UK locking thousands of people up for Facebook memes, this would probably be a convincing argument. Ironic considering Starmer is a human rights lawyer by trade.

>...surely can be explained, that if adjusted for non-impaired people and considering the survival rate for when an accident happens, the danger is much lower for cars

No. This is false equivalence. You are far more likely to die in a car than you are in an airplane, full stop.

First, one doesn't need to be impaired to die from a drunk driver. Only ~60% of the people who die in DUI accidents are the impaired driver. You can do everything right, but you're constantly surrounded by people making mistakes. You are not alone on the road. And even then, nearly 70% of traffic fatalities did not involve any impairment!

You are still far more likely to die riding in any normal passenger car in the US on public roadways than you are by taking any commercial air traffic, even if you limit it to instances where the driver of the vehicle the deceased was in was not impaired. And that's deaths, ignoring how many people are severely injured. Throw that into the mix and its absurd how much safer airline travel is.

Next: take a look at death and injury comparisons of highways to light rail and other public transit.

(warning: pdf) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/api/public/publication/8135...

If journalists deliver an inaccurate view of the world through their work, they should be criticized for it.

I too always thought it was common knowledge that a lot of people die from disease but much fewer die in obscure ways that are reported on.

I'm not sure the word 'preventable' belongs in that sentence. Odds are, if COVID-19 gets you, in the absence of COVID-19 some other cold or flu will get you instead (or in the near future). That's very different from an accident where the outcomes are 40+ years of life apart in many cases.

That's why gross deaths aren't a great measure. Lost expected years of life remaining is much better. Its why we morn the loss of a child so much more than a grandparent.

Determining primary cause of death is often somewhat subjective. Almost everyone listed as a COVID-19 death had other serious co-morbid medical conditions. If a deceased patient had heart failure and type-2 diabetes, and also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, then what killed them in the end? Hard to say. (Same issue applies to influenza etc.)

The data seems flawed. Also the number at the left chart for homicide with <1% is technically correct, but with the actual number at roughly 0,007% it seems like a bit of an exaggeration.

A HUGE amount of the population in my quickly-regressing country don't believe that COVID was the killer that it in fact was. Most people don't talk about it because as with everything (NFL halftime shows, restaurant logos, etc) in my quickly-regressing country, COVID is a topic that inflames passions.

For a while, if a person had COVID within the previous month, any subsequent death counted as COVID. Recover from COVID and jump out of a plane without a parachute? COVID. I believe that doesn’t happen much anymore, at least I hope.

I suspect what may be happening is that we have some very sick, elderly people with only weeks to months to live who catch COVID and die. Those deaths may still be counted as COVID deaths.

Most deaths attributed to heart diseases are not natural at all, and I would argue it's the same for a lot of cancer cases.

Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.

We definitely should adjust coverage of homicide (by either tone, volume, who knows) until people are no longer disproportionately living in fear of it or in fear of cities.

But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is the point, it's how they control people.

The premise of the article is that this kind of reporting has actual policy effects. You just just missed their point because of your disdain for their "super-dimensional level of stupidity".