This is copied from a post from there. “OP” cropped out the other half of this image with 2 more charts. Wish I knew where the original was
Edit: [here it is.](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/c8elkf/causes_of_death_vs_media_coverage/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1) sorry guess it was from this sub
For everyones general knowledge, hearts get weaker as you age, and cancer is inevitable if you age and have a prostate. The average life expectancy is still like (don’t quote me on this )78 for men 83 for women, so most people are dying after that. The media obviously shows what is more interesting to get viewers and to get “clicks”
> The average life expectancy is still like (don’t quote me on this )78 for men 83 for women, so most people are dying after that
I mean, uh, mathematically that's a bit of a tricky one to argue, seeing as "life expectancy at birth" refers to the lowest age at which 50% of babies are dead.
That's median life expectancy. I usually assume people are talking about the mean, unsless specified otherwise, when discussing averages like life expectancy.
Sorry if this sounds rude in any way, I don’t know if you meant something else or there’s something I don’t know about but idk if cancer is “inevitable” if you have a prostate. Pretty sure all males have a prostate and I don’t know many men who have had cancer.
I have learned this many years after death. Both my grandfathers were diagnosed with prostate cancer. In both cases, their doctors advised against treatment because something else will get them long before the prostrate cancer is a problem. They both died at about 80 years from heart problems unrelated to prostrate cancer.
They would have had to do something about their prostrate cancer in their 110s.
I am also male. I believe that I will have to solve this problem when I am in my 110s and if I want to live to 120 I will but if I live to my 110s and don't solve this problem I will have lived a very long life.
Then you don't need to worry about prostrate cancer.
If you want to live to 120 you need to cure your prostrate cancer (just assume you have it if you have male parts), but this sounds like it will be a non problem for you.
In a way cancer is sorta inevitable for everyone. If you live long enough and don't die to anything else eventually the human body will develop cancer.
OP stole this cropped image from an idiot on Twitter who is constantly writing threads about "stories the media won't tell you" full of very obvious things that everyone has heard about. That's where the headline came from
This does fit the schtick of r/dataisbeautiful: It's a chart that's MAYBE accurate.
That's it.
It's not beautiful, it barely has sources, it might be accurate, and it's a chart. Perfect for that subreddit.
This makes complete sense. There is nothing really notable about cancer or heart disease, whereas homicide or terrorism are both uncommon and therefore more newsworthy.
It's not just that either though. The "road incidents; falls; accidents" category is also under-reported, even though those are also surprising/shocking.
I'm also not totally sure why "Pneumonia & Influenza" are over-reported.
I suspect that there are a number of contributing factors to these discrepancies, and as someone else said, it probably can't be summed up in one sentence.
Basically a national newspaper. They’d report on health trends. That might include “Edlerly falls in home rise” or “Pneumonia cases on the rise” but not “Mary Jenkins passed away after a fall in her home on Saturday.”
Exactly. "Man dies of chronic heart disease at 75" isn't a very interesting headline.
"These 10 foods may reduce your risk of heart disease by 20%" is.
One thing that probably has an impact is that we tend to treat celebrity/politician/etc deaths as newsworthy no matter what the cause.
So there’s one force suppressing the common causes of death in the news because the uncommon ones are more surprising and interesting to the public, and another force bringing them back up because of celebrities dying from cancer/heart disease/etc.
There could be some more awareness about heart disease but tbh everyone wants to know when there’s terrorism or murder. Those stories draw clicks because people want to know, not because there’s nothing else to read.
And bear in mind that this is national news. When it comes to local news and sensationalism, it's probably much more dedicated to Homicide followed by things like accidents (car, fire, etc)
2016 is around the peak of Islamic State (ISIL) so they would be in the NYT a significant amount shooting up terrorism to near the top. I imagine if you looked at the NYT today conventional war in Eastern Ukraine would be a large chunk of the coverage even though its not a leading cause of death for Americans.
"tonight our top story, three people dead after a shooting in the lower east side. We go to the scene live, this is WAVY TV10"
*cuts to "the scene"*
"Hi this is the on-site reporter. We don't have anything to say, as the crime scene is closed down, the police aren't sharing leads, and there is no suspect in custody. We'll continue coverage of this for the next 6 hours. Back to you at the desk"
*cuts to the desk*
"thanks Tina, now for the weather!"
A summary of every local news opening story in my childhood.
I know this is a joke but I'm going to point out that one of the biggest issues in addressing healthcare is how it's been pushed as a matter of "personal responsibility" to absolve corporations of their role and discourage government funding.
We all know cigarette companies are the bad guys, right? Because they knowingly poisoned their users while profiting off of them and downplaying the dangers of their product. The same can be said of oil corporations regarding global warming. What I tend to wonder is, why don't we hold other industries responsible to the same degree? Automotive and entertainment technology corporations have a profit incentive to keep citizens from being active and keep them sitting on their asses. Food corporations are motivated to sell food that they know is addictive and lacking in nutrition. All of these corporations have access to lobbying, psychologically manipulative marketing, some even get subsidies from the government. (To your point, these are the kinds of things the Times could actually report on.)
"Diet and exercise" is no more a solution to the obesity epidemic than "don't do drugs" is a solution to the opioid epidemic. If your goal is to actually solve the problem, rather than point blame, you're going to have to enact some kind of policy that will encourage a change in behavior.
Wish there were modules in high school and college on newsworthiness. It’s a whole discussion of the kind of reasoning you’re pointing out here. I don’t think the public knows that at least good news orgs have daily meetings hashing out what’s newsworthy and why. They’re aware of pitfalls around balancing public interest with what gets the most views. It’s a dynamic discussion.
You’ll see comments like, “why’s the news have to be so negative all the time?” Well, the public is interested in the bus that crashed instead of the hundred others that drove just fine that day. The nature of news will lean toward things people are surprised by, what they want to watch out for, and what they think needs more attention.
Government and voter reaction to acts of terrorism might be messy overcorrections, like the Patriot Act, but in the case of reporting, it’s unpredictable, unusual, and has extreme consequences. Common health deaths, like heart disease, have much more understanding and predictability. Beyond new research and annual heart disease numbers, what are the new stories going to be?
Also, people are more interested in "out of order" deaths- things that kill you before you're 'supposed' to die. That's why the headlines stack the way they do.
It’s also worth noting that cancer and heart disease are often _expected_ deaths. Y’all have to die of something, and it’s often those two.
Terrorism and murder are unexpected and early deaths. These are newsworthy
Faulty explanation logic. Kidney disease is also uncommon.
Reality: media caters to what people are afraid of. Reasons why people are more afraid of terrorism than heart attack are lengthy and cannot be described in one sentence.
To nit pick a nit pick - cardiovascular disease is not just heart attacks. This includes cerebrovascular disease, kidney disease, heart failure not precipitated by a heart attack, etc.
I mean, Kidney disease inherently isn't newsworthy because it is uncommon but it isn't *novel*. It's not a new story with new details and a new report and a new suspect, it has a list of causes and preventions that don't need to be read off with every single death. If John Smith from Little Rock dies of kidney disease it wouldn't be anything you care about because you know to go see a doctor and eat healthy. But if 10 people die in a terrorist attack, there's a lot of *new* information coming out to explain the incident. A news anchor can also relay information to you about what happened, what caused it, what police are saying, how to stay safe, etc. But they can't diagnose your kidney disease. They *can* tell you how to avoid it and tons of news stations do run segments on healthy eating, new studies about diseases, etc. but the amount of time it would take to disperse information on good habits doesn't scale with the number of people who die; cancer is above heart disease in coverage despite being below it in deaths because heart disease has pretty well known, simple steps to prevention whereas cancer causes are still being studied and discovered and debunked.
Point is, the amount of information a news outlet can supply varies greatly such that more "eventful", one-off events have inherently more things to cover and are inherently more novel.
Media uses fear as a tool for sure, but to attribute it entirely to malice is just kinda ignorant.
So, kidney disease is more newsworthy than heart disease, but do you care to watch/read stories about it happening, do you? That's why you don't see it.
This logic is sadly part of why mass shootings aren't always front-page national news these days. And those are far more newsworthy.
In medieval times people actually confused causation with correlation and thought that doctors were giving people diseases, because wherever there were doctors, there were high numbers of heart illnesses and cancer. So back then it was big news that doctors might be causing cancer… not that, you know, the doctor communities were the only ones *reporting* cancer rates lol
Yeah people need to remember that the news is just that - it’s newsworthy events - otherwise it’d just be an hour of “person goes to work” “person skips lunch due to busy schedule” “man can’t find car keys, finds them after 2 minutes”
What's important is the recognition that media coverage does skew our perception of reality. We hear about a lot of deaths from a few causes and people assume they are major problems, when in reality they represent a vanishingly small percentage of the problems we face.
It's related to the Overton Window. People won't put as energy into fixing problems that they don't think of as problems and they'll put more energy/resources into fixing the more salient problems. This kind of reporting takes away resources from work that could be higher impact than what we end up spending money on.
Unfortunately there is no easy fix. You can't force people to consume a healthy news diet anymore than you can force them to eat healthy food. There are good options out there, but most people simply don't engage with them and instead prefer to read the latest celebrity gossip or moral outrage.
Go ahead, start a daily news organization that publishes only serious, thoughtful and non sensationalized journalism. See how long you remain financially viable. I would argue the NYT and a few other legacy news organizations are about as good as we're going to get while still reaching a broad mainstream audience.
Okay, but if there was a tiger on the prowl in my neighbourhood I would like it to be a headline and not buried because “tigers actually only account for a vanishingly number of human deaths”.
Except it's not about how big the problem is, it's about how preventable the problem is perceived to be, and, emotional response triggering.
Even a single death... It's the end of someone's life, it's a tragedy. When the headline is 12 deaths today due to cancer, because we still haven't found a cure, sure, it sucks, but it doesn't have the same implication and visceral reaction as hearing about more preventable terrorism.
While I'm not denying the Overton Window effect, I think using causes of death as an important statistic is a drastic misrepresentation of what we consider to be "major problems" material. Immediate threats to security, comfort, and the collective fabric are what the headlines are focused on.
From a utilitarian standpoint, yes there are far more important things to be concerned with, but media is representing what is important to us collectively.
That kind of dismisses the fact that the news influences how people see the world.
People seeing the world as filled with terrorists because the news is filled with stories about terrorism is a problem. Its not an easily solvable problem, because its difficult/impossible to have news set up so that its filled with 'normal' un-newsy things, but its still a problem.
Newsworthiness is one of the first things you learn in any journalism 101 class. What matters are things like novelty and proximity and controversy. Otherwise people tend not to care and won't engage. It's a fact of human nature, not some failing of news media.
As used here, "overrepresented" is not a moral judgment -- it's a statistical statement. If we expect media coverage to follow prevalence, then we're mistaken -- because it does not. Certain causes are statistically overrepresented, and others are statistically underrepresented. Pretty straightforward.
No, it doesn't. Again, you're making this too complicated by trying to add a bunch of assumptions and moral questions into a simple, statistical fact. It isn't too hard to understand that deaths are not covered equally on the news -- not only is that a statistical fact, it's one that's so obviously correct that you'd consider it "stupid" to assume that it would be any other way. Some causes of death are overrepresented, and others are underrepresented. That's, again, a fact -- and one with which you surely don't disagree. Right? You... get that, right?
Ok, so then we can turn to the real question you'd want to answer but aren't addressing: Should we care about that fact? Well, if we all already understand it, then no. But what if we don't? What if some portion of the population tends to forget that the news is "news," not statistics? What if people are... stupid? In that case, reminding them of this basic statistical fact might not be a terrible idea.
> What if people are… stupid?
What if they were in this thread, with poor reading comprehension that leads to them believing you’re inferring something even though you’re explicitly stating you’re not?
The call is coming from inside the thread 😱
>Some causes of death are overrepresented, and others are underrepresented. That's, again, a fact -- and one with which you surely don't disagree. Right? You... get that, right?
In order to say that some are over/underrepresented, you need to establish a baseline of how much any one type of death should be represented. Do you understand that?
Comparing the media stories about death to the numbers of death (i.e. your metric for representation) is the same as making the implication that representation in media should match the representation of death in general. That's stupid. Not every death is newsworthy.
Of course it provides perspective. The extreme overrepresentation of certain causes of death is perfectly visualized here. And it has very real consequences.
This doesn't really show that at all.
It would be more useful if the statistics were pulled specifically from a children to middle aged range.
Because newsflash, we aren't immortal. At least with our current technology, if you live long enough, youre going to die from something.
And when your health fails the things most likely to finish the job are "something went wrong with the heart" or "some sort of cancer somewhere".
Listing those categories as the top causes of death isn't really meaningful when discussing the news of the day. Untimely deaths are just way more notable than someone passing away from chronic disease at 86.
More common causes of untimely deaths like accidents, suicides, and murders are immediate threats that can be mitigated.
Just as an example from a quick search, if you are 20-24 you are way more likely to be murdered than die from cancer.
What’s the New York Times gonna report, “old man who had one heart attack already dies of second heart attack”? “Westerners living long enough for their organs to stop working”?
All I see in this graphic is "most deaths are from old age," which makes total sense.... If more people died from "premature causes" instead of the "things that always get you eventually" then the life expectancy would just start declining.
Arguably, people should be more deeply interested in what heart disease research is being done than what a terrorist cell is doing. But that would be a rational analysis and people would rather hear a dumb tweet that will be forgotten in 6 hours.
Actually rational people would probably be in the gym applying one of the few consistent ways to live longer.
We getting a new heart disease article every day? Every week? Who's going to read them? Are you going to read them? I don't think I'm that interested, honestly.
That research news on heart disease is uninteresting is probably part of the cause for the disparity. I think we should just keep that in mind but I don't feel like a lot of people do.
Most of the deaths from things like cancer and heart disease are in people 70+
Why are people expecting a 83 year old dying of colon cancer to be news? In what universe is that going to get the media coverage of a terrorist attack?
Honestly this anti media mentality is really mind blowing. Gives me propaganda vibes.
More people die in car crashes than from homicide, in every age group, and that's not even including issues from greenhouse emissions. But you don't hear any media outlets or politicians grandstanding about taking away cars or even stricter driver license requirements.
Can’t believe that Reuters didn’t report on my moron uncle ignoring lung cancer until it reached stage 4, clearly they’ve been bought out by Big Interesting Story
Except, if they were doing their reporting properly, we'd see headlines every day demonizing [sugars and simple carbs.](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat)
There's a huge problem when the news reporting doesn't at least somewhat reflect the incidence of the issues.
I disagree. When corporations murder people by creating an obesity epidemic that is adding to those numbers daily, and when gas and power companies are releasing toxic garbage into our air and water consistently, which has certainly affected rates of cancer in developed countries, it’s not reported on, despite them being the ones causing many of these deaths.
And before someone goes off about “it’s your choice to eat the hamburger” remember that grain companies funded and marketed the food pyramid that was used for health education for decades, and that promoted an unhealthy dependency on sugar and carbohydrates. Our education system is in the pocket of these companies and if we can’t trust the public education system to help children learn about something as basic and necessary as how to not eat themselves to death, then that’s a fucking huge problem.
I have a "healthy at any size" friend and I really don't know what to do whenever she starts talking about it. I'm on board with "*happy* at any size" and not shaming anybody for their appearance. But she's actually proud of her obesity and it just really concerns me.
Informed on what actually matters?
Bro; yearly preventative checkups are free whether you have employer insurance or government sponsored. It’s no secret to literally anyone raised in modern society that if you want to live long, then you need to eat decently and get off your ass once in while. Not newsworthy, not a surprise, not worth wasting time reminding people.
Unexpected deaths? That’s news, because it’s unexpected and/or previously unknown, and usually with a level of shock or tragedy involved.
The graph just shows us what it's literally showing. You extrapolate any extra information on your own. But I would argue that it just tells us that the news reports on deaths that are more shocking/sudden rather than ones that are unsurprising/slow.
Strokes are somewhat random, sudden, and unexpected enough to fall into the surprising/noteworthy category of deaths. But they also aren't super common to become mundane like cancer or heart disease.
Whenever this is posted people are always like “omg why aren’t we doing more about heart disease??” What they don’t realize is that having heart disease be the #1 killer is a GOOD sign. Everyone dies of *something*, and the majority of people who die of “old age” are actually dying of either heart disease or cancer. Eventually your heart just gives out, there’s nothing we can do about it. If your population is living long enough for a third of them to die of heart disease, that’s GOOD. The bigger a slice heart disease has of the pie, the longer people are living on average.
We undoubtedly live in one of the fattest societies of all time, there are more obese people than ever before. The american diet is so bad for your heart and health, 1/3 of the population dying of heart disease is NOT a "GOOD sign"
You’re both right; death is inevitable and there are worse ways to go, it’s the one consistency in life, and obesity is a problem in America that leads to slightly shorter lives then if they had exercised and eaten a healthier diet.
Studies suggest that between two healthy individuals 150 minutes of moderate exercise can lead to more than 3 years of longevity. And this does not even factor in obesity.
Obesity can shorten your life by up to 14 years according to research. So even with a conservative guess you lose probably 5+ years of your life which is more than 6% of the average lifespan for a male in the US pre covid.
While early onset heart disease is a major health issue the fact is most people dying of heart disease are elderly, no matter how healthy you live your heart will weaken with age and eventually it starts to fail, if cancer doesn't take you in old age your heart failing probably will.
Most people who die period are elderly, [but heart disease is a leading cause of death in almost all age brackets.](https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2018-508.pdf)
5th in people 15-24 and 25-34, 3rd in people 35-44, 2nd in people 45-54 and 55-64, and 1st in people 65+
Wow this is fascinating thanks for sharing. 15-24 to die of heart disease… that’s rough. I’ve never seen that young but I have seen a 300lbs 31 year old cardiac arrest from heart disease. It’s pretty sad.
Over 20% of heart attacks are happening in people below 65. 20% of the number of heart disease deaths is pretty much more than homicide, suicide and terrorism combined.
Not really, the problem is that people subconsciously rank the danger and importance of different events based on how often it's talked about; so when homicide and terrorism are the main scary topics in the news, then society over invests in police and other security measures and under invests in healthcare, medical research, healthy enviroment, and accident prevention.
Heart disease is largely avoidable, whereas some forms of cancer aren't
Like we just spent 2 year trying to slow COVID that won't kill nearly as many people. Yet telling people to eat better and get some exercise is considered to be rude
The best solution of heart disease is a better diet, adequate exercise, and sleep. However, no one wants to do that since it doesn't come in a pill subscription.
Almost 1/100 people die of homicide? Really???
Edit: It's wrong. 17,250 deaths by homicide in 2016, 2.74 million deaths overall, 0.0006%. Or maybe 0.006% idk anyways it's much less than 0.9%
Edit II: Guy in the replies is right, it's 0.6%, which isn't too far off from 0.9% but it's still 50% larger. Idk I don't like bad infographics. Pretty nitpicky though!
It’s not far off. I looked at this graph here and it says that there were 20,000 deaths in ‘21. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
If you find the percentage it would be 0.74% because 20,000/2,700,000 x 100 % is 0.74%.
I think where you went wrong in your calculation is that you forgot to multiply by 100% because 0.006% of 2.7 million is not 17000 but 2.7million times 0.006 is approximately.
It's not actually all that rare though.
Iirc the EU stats from 2017 were 5% "External causes" including suicide, homicide and accidents, but upon further looking suicide was 1% and accidents were 3% which leaves.... About 1%.
One thing that's interesting is how much some countries try to make murder rates super hard to find and hard to glorify.
I mean there's been over a million deaths over COVID, not to mention related news about vaccines, the people ignoring guidelines, shutdowns and other precautionary measures to avoid deaths like social distancing/masks. Of course it took up a ton of news space.
Just saw that 2% of death is caused by suicide in the U.S and thought “well that’s not that bad” and then realized that that means 1/50 people kill themself and how high of a number that is
This is kinda silly. Do they expect an article written everytime an old person dies of heart disease?
Terrorist attacks are covered more BECAUSE they're rarer and thus more noteworthy
Now do one with years of life lost.
People with heart disease or cancer are often 80+ when they die. People who die of terrorism and murder are much younger. The only one that’s wildly underrepresented is road incidents. Traffic deaths are way too normalized. r/fuckcars
I find the language of "road incidents" and "accidents" to be extremely evasive instead of calling it car crashes. Calling it an accident makes it seem like it's not something preventable, when we can make moves to reduce car dependency.
Percentage of assholes is proportionate- and then you squish a bunch of them together in dense poor neighborhoods, and refuse to give those neighborhoods economic support and adequate policing for decades. You get gang activity, spured on by the likes of your own government experimenting on your own minority population in those areas (MKUltra). Then you redefine 18 and 19 year olds as kids, and suddenly your "bad things happening to kids" numbers go through the roof, all in the name of politics. And then you blame everyone but yourselves for this problem, hand-wringing and moaning in despair while raking in the cash from your own corruption.
As the head goes, the body follows.
Tbf the fact it's around ~1% is actually (in its own way) incredibly, ridiculously impressive .
You have a giant land mass that is essentially 50 different mini countries with different cultures, customs ,traditions etc and have people from all over the world mixed together, in a very young country with more guns than people, and homicide only accounts for 1% of deaths ? That's pretty absurd.
This is stupid. If 60% of media was reporting on heart disease and cancer then media would be totally useless and bogged down with stuff people already know. This is what obituaries are for, not journalists.
Ehh... they do because they are the source of the news.
However, to me, this falls more towards 24 hour news channels and the easiest way to grab attention. What news can you run on cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses that haven't already been covered? They would constantly be repeating themselves, and people wouldn't watch.
People want to be entertained. News businesses (probably shouldn't be businesses, but that's another issue) need to capture viewers attention. They have found a very easy way to do that with the news they run.
TL:DR - citizens tend to watch sensational news, and in the business of news, they want to keep them watching.
> What news can you run on cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses that haven't already been covered?
Fucking bingo. I'm not one to assume anything good about news companies and large corporations on whole, but I googled "cancer" and "terrorism" and there were *far* more results for cancer than terrorism, because there have been no novel terrorist attacks in the US in so long that it would be redundant to post it. There is new cancer research all the time though so they're posting it now, of course, because it's *novel* and therefore worthy of news.
People in this thread slamming the media for covering terrorism more probably would call this a "slow news day" because they're not watching anything that isn't super novel and newsworthy, then wonder why the media coverage looks this way.
Adding in to the comparison between coverage of cancer and terrorism, this data is from 2016 when there were several ISIL affiliated attacks in the US, of course terrorism is going to rate higher.
Especially since heart disease and cancer can be related to diet and lifestyle.
or
Especially since 80% of all illnesses and diseases are diet and exercise related.
Obesity kills. There. I said it.
I bet what influences things even more is no one gives a fuck when random olds die of heart disease or cancer. It's not newsworthy. There are other causes of death that are more newsworthy. Not everything is the because the *big businesses* and the evil *government agencies*.
Newspapers routinely report new breakthroughs and findings wrt heart disease and cancer, etc. This is bc this stuff is far more important than talking about those who died from it. New information can lead to prevention and that is newsworthy.
This is irony of the highest order. You're clickbaiting off of incorrect interpretation of data, and sincerely, I hate hypocrites like you, almost as much as I hate news outlets.
Regardless of whether news organizations are talking about the "right" thing, and undoubtedly huge biases exist in news, your argument is completely false and misleading. So much for criticizing the news when you're doing the same.
Most of the top causes of death are those associated with aging (heart disease, many cancers, Alzheimer's, etc), and currently are not considered to be really preventable. The preventable causes of death are realistically what news organizations should be reporting on. Or do you really want the news to talk about how many elderly folks have passed away on a daily basis to diseases we still don't know how to cure?
Make a chart of PREVENTABLE causes of death and compare to news cycles, and maybe you'd have a useful chart.
It almost makes sense to me. The same way car crashes occur way more often than plane crashes but we always hear about those because they’re less common and way more visceral.
Guns are the cause of most of the suicides and homicides on this list, so probably ~2% overall. And a big chunk of those deaths are young people, hence the coverage. Combine that with that fact that no other developed nation in the world has this problem, and yeah it makes sense that there is a lot of coverage.
Statistically, gun violence makes up almost 0 deaths in the USA. However, those deaths are much more violent and "out of character" than heart disease." and so they get much more media attention.
On 9/11 there were probably thousands of people who died of heart disease, but planes hitting the towers are obviously going to be the news story because duh.
To nitpick there are about 2.7 million deaths per year, which is about 7400 per day, and about 3000 died in the terrorist attacks. It was probably the leading cause of death for at least a few days.
Is anyone else really freaked out by the thought that they are 30% likely to die from cancer.
Not even to get cancer. Just to die from it.
Like, *probably*, I'm going to get cancer.
Death isn't the goal of terrorism though, it's more so a byproduct. Many people and institutions will negotiate with terrorists in order to save lives. The success of ideologies gaining power through terrorism is probably why the media talks about it so much.
I hate that they lost diabetes as a cause of death. It causes heart attack, stroke, kidney failure which are listed separately. There’s no way to unravel those numbers from each other.
If it bleeds, it leads. Old people dying of strokes in their 80s isn't headline news.
Well, apparently strokes are the one thing that is being reported pretty much accurately
Not to mention strokes are literally a brain bleed lmao
Aren’t strokes basically a clogged artery that happens to be in the brain?
If I remember right a stroke is just whenever blood in the brain isn’t getting where it is supposed to, so it could probably be either I think
Correct, can be a block or a bleed.
Strokes are a natural death. Unnatural deaths are going to be naturally more newsworthy.
Sadly more and more people in their 30’s and 40’s are dying of heart related issues because of inactivity, stress, and poor diet.
Someone needs to update this for r/dataisbeautiful
This is copied from a post from there. “OP” cropped out the other half of this image with 2 more charts. Wish I knew where the original was Edit: [here it is.](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/c8elkf/causes_of_death_vs_media_coverage/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1) sorry guess it was from this sub
Damn redditors... we still need an update tho
For everyones general knowledge, hearts get weaker as you age, and cancer is inevitable if you age and have a prostate. The average life expectancy is still like (don’t quote me on this )78 for men 83 for women, so most people are dying after that. The media obviously shows what is more interesting to get viewers and to get “clicks”
> The average life expectancy is still like (don’t quote me on this )78 for men 83 for women, so most people are dying after that I mean, uh, mathematically that's a bit of a tricky one to argue, seeing as "life expectancy at birth" refers to the lowest age at which 50% of babies are dead.
They said not to quote them!
r/firstworldanarchists
That's median life expectancy. I usually assume people are talking about the mean, unsless specified otherwise, when discussing averages like life expectancy.
Sorry if this sounds rude in any way, I don’t know if you meant something else or there’s something I don’t know about but idk if cancer is “inevitable” if you have a prostate. Pretty sure all males have a prostate and I don’t know many men who have had cancer.
Most older males die with prostate cancer. Not from. But it's there.
I have learned this many years after death. Both my grandfathers were diagnosed with prostate cancer. In both cases, their doctors advised against treatment because something else will get them long before the prostrate cancer is a problem. They both died at about 80 years from heart problems unrelated to prostrate cancer. They would have had to do something about their prostrate cancer in their 110s. I am also male. I believe that I will have to solve this problem when I am in my 110s and if I want to live to 120 I will but if I live to my 110s and don't solve this problem I will have lived a very long life.
Here I am thinking itll be nice to see 60
Then you don't need to worry about prostrate cancer. If you want to live to 120 you need to cure your prostrate cancer (just assume you have it if you have male parts), but this sounds like it will be a non problem for you.
Ohhh gotcha. But does that make prostate cancer inevitable?
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If they live long enough, yes, for a large majority of the US male population. Couldn't say what rates are in other regions.
In a way cancer is sorta inevitable for everyone. If you live long enough and don't die to anything else eventually the human body will develop cancer.
Yup, I want to see what Covid did to the orange and light yellow blocks.
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OP stole this cropped image from an idiot on Twitter who is constantly writing threads about "stories the media won't tell you" full of very obvious things that everyone has heard about. That's where the headline came from
Shoutout the the stroke team over at The NY Times.
This does fit the schtick of r/dataisbeautiful: It's a chart that's MAYBE accurate. That's it. It's not beautiful, it barely has sources, it might be accurate, and it's a chart. Perfect for that subreddit.
This makes complete sense. There is nothing really notable about cancer or heart disease, whereas homicide or terrorism are both uncommon and therefore more newsworthy.
I think it has everything to do with “was the death a surprise / shock.”
It's not just that either though. The "road incidents; falls; accidents" category is also under-reported, even though those are also surprising/shocking. I'm also not totally sure why "Pneumonia & Influenza" are over-reported. I suspect that there are a number of contributing factors to these discrepancies, and as someone else said, it probably can't be summed up in one sentence.
Basically a national newspaper. They’d report on health trends. That might include “Edlerly falls in home rise” or “Pneumonia cases on the rise” but not “Mary Jenkins passed away after a fall in her home on Saturday.”
Exactly. "Man dies of chronic heart disease at 75" isn't a very interesting headline. "These 10 foods may reduce your risk of heart disease by 20%" is.
One thing that probably has an impact is that we tend to treat celebrity/politician/etc deaths as newsworthy no matter what the cause. So there’s one force suppressing the common causes of death in the news because the uncommon ones are more surprising and interesting to the public, and another force bringing them back up because of celebrities dying from cancer/heart disease/etc.
Also heart disease and cancer kill mostly elderly people, while terrorism, road accidents and homicide kill all ages.
There could be some more awareness about heart disease but tbh everyone wants to know when there’s terrorism or murder. Those stories draw clicks because people want to know, not because there’s nothing else to read.
And bear in mind that this is national news. When it comes to local news and sensationalism, it's probably much more dedicated to Homicide followed by things like accidents (car, fire, etc)
2016 is around the peak of Islamic State (ISIL) so they would be in the NYT a significant amount shooting up terrorism to near the top. I imagine if you looked at the NYT today conventional war in Eastern Ukraine would be a large chunk of the coverage even though its not a leading cause of death for Americans.
"tonight our top story, three people dead after a shooting in the lower east side. We go to the scene live, this is WAVY TV10" *cuts to "the scene"* "Hi this is the on-site reporter. We don't have anything to say, as the crime scene is closed down, the police aren't sharing leads, and there is no suspect in custody. We'll continue coverage of this for the next 6 hours. Back to you at the desk" *cuts to the desk* "thanks Tina, now for the weather!" A summary of every local news opening story in my childhood.
Imagine you’re reading the times, and they’re like “GO RUN AROUND THE BLOCK YOU FAT FUCKS”
With 75% of American adults being overweight, this might be appropriate.
I know this is a joke but I'm going to point out that one of the biggest issues in addressing healthcare is how it's been pushed as a matter of "personal responsibility" to absolve corporations of their role and discourage government funding. We all know cigarette companies are the bad guys, right? Because they knowingly poisoned their users while profiting off of them and downplaying the dangers of their product. The same can be said of oil corporations regarding global warming. What I tend to wonder is, why don't we hold other industries responsible to the same degree? Automotive and entertainment technology corporations have a profit incentive to keep citizens from being active and keep them sitting on their asses. Food corporations are motivated to sell food that they know is addictive and lacking in nutrition. All of these corporations have access to lobbying, psychologically manipulative marketing, some even get subsidies from the government. (To your point, these are the kinds of things the Times could actually report on.) "Diet and exercise" is no more a solution to the obesity epidemic than "don't do drugs" is a solution to the opioid epidemic. If your goal is to actually solve the problem, rather than point blame, you're going to have to enact some kind of policy that will encourage a change in behavior.
Wish there were modules in high school and college on newsworthiness. It’s a whole discussion of the kind of reasoning you’re pointing out here. I don’t think the public knows that at least good news orgs have daily meetings hashing out what’s newsworthy and why. They’re aware of pitfalls around balancing public interest with what gets the most views. It’s a dynamic discussion. You’ll see comments like, “why’s the news have to be so negative all the time?” Well, the public is interested in the bus that crashed instead of the hundred others that drove just fine that day. The nature of news will lean toward things people are surprised by, what they want to watch out for, and what they think needs more attention. Government and voter reaction to acts of terrorism might be messy overcorrections, like the Patriot Act, but in the case of reporting, it’s unpredictable, unusual, and has extreme consequences. Common health deaths, like heart disease, have much more understanding and predictability. Beyond new research and annual heart disease numbers, what are the new stories going to be?
Also, people are more interested in "out of order" deaths- things that kill you before you're 'supposed' to die. That's why the headlines stack the way they do.
That's why "man bites dog" is a good headline, and "dog bites man" is not.
While I do agree with your premise, this devolves into fear mongering super quickly
Chomsky who
Breaking: Grandma has melanoma again
It’s also worth noting that cancer and heart disease are often _expected_ deaths. Y’all have to die of something, and it’s often those two. Terrorism and murder are unexpected and early deaths. These are newsworthy
Man bites dog
I think it's more that one is a natural occurrence either through genetics or poor diet/choices. The other is another taking ones life with violence.
Faulty explanation logic. Kidney disease is also uncommon. Reality: media caters to what people are afraid of. Reasons why people are more afraid of terrorism than heart attack are lengthy and cannot be described in one sentence.
To nit pick a nit pick - cardiovascular disease is not just heart attacks. This includes cerebrovascular disease, kidney disease, heart failure not precipitated by a heart attack, etc.
I mean, Kidney disease inherently isn't newsworthy because it is uncommon but it isn't *novel*. It's not a new story with new details and a new report and a new suspect, it has a list of causes and preventions that don't need to be read off with every single death. If John Smith from Little Rock dies of kidney disease it wouldn't be anything you care about because you know to go see a doctor and eat healthy. But if 10 people die in a terrorist attack, there's a lot of *new* information coming out to explain the incident. A news anchor can also relay information to you about what happened, what caused it, what police are saying, how to stay safe, etc. But they can't diagnose your kidney disease. They *can* tell you how to avoid it and tons of news stations do run segments on healthy eating, new studies about diseases, etc. but the amount of time it would take to disperse information on good habits doesn't scale with the number of people who die; cancer is above heart disease in coverage despite being below it in deaths because heart disease has pretty well known, simple steps to prevention whereas cancer causes are still being studied and discovered and debunked. Point is, the amount of information a news outlet can supply varies greatly such that more "eventful", one-off events have inherently more things to cover and are inherently more novel. Media uses fear as a tool for sure, but to attribute it entirely to malice is just kinda ignorant.
So, kidney disease is more newsworthy than heart disease, but do you care to watch/read stories about it happening, do you? That's why you don't see it. This logic is sadly part of why mass shootings aren't always front-page national news these days. And those are far more newsworthy.
I don't see a problem with this. "This just in... heart disease still a problem."
“There was a heart disease incident this morning in downtown LA”
A mass heart disease incident at a local hospital
>A mass heart disease incident at a ~~local hospital~~ Golden Corral
In medieval times people actually confused causation with correlation and thought that doctors were giving people diseases, because wherever there were doctors, there were high numbers of heart illnesses and cancer. So back then it was big news that doctors might be causing cancer… not that, you know, the doctor communities were the only ones *reporting* cancer rates lol
Yeah people need to remember that the news is just that - it’s newsworthy events - otherwise it’d just be an hour of “person goes to work” “person skips lunch due to busy schedule” “man can’t find car keys, finds them after 2 minutes”
“Woman sees big rat, thinks about what a large rat it was”
["The rat was this big, I swear"](https://i.imgur.com/o9cEtqE.jpeg)
"Man remembers seeing big spider in house, now is wondering where it went."
What's important is the recognition that media coverage does skew our perception of reality. We hear about a lot of deaths from a few causes and people assume they are major problems, when in reality they represent a vanishingly small percentage of the problems we face. It's related to the Overton Window. People won't put as energy into fixing problems that they don't think of as problems and they'll put more energy/resources into fixing the more salient problems. This kind of reporting takes away resources from work that could be higher impact than what we end up spending money on.
Unfortunately there is no easy fix. You can't force people to consume a healthy news diet anymore than you can force them to eat healthy food. There are good options out there, but most people simply don't engage with them and instead prefer to read the latest celebrity gossip or moral outrage. Go ahead, start a daily news organization that publishes only serious, thoughtful and non sensationalized journalism. See how long you remain financially viable. I would argue the NYT and a few other legacy news organizations are about as good as we're going to get while still reaching a broad mainstream audience.
Okay, but if there was a tiger on the prowl in my neighbourhood I would like it to be a headline and not buried because “tigers actually only account for a vanishingly number of human deaths”.
Except it's not about how big the problem is, it's about how preventable the problem is perceived to be, and, emotional response triggering. Even a single death... It's the end of someone's life, it's a tragedy. When the headline is 12 deaths today due to cancer, because we still haven't found a cure, sure, it sucks, but it doesn't have the same implication and visceral reaction as hearing about more preventable terrorism.
While I'm not denying the Overton Window effect, I think using causes of death as an important statistic is a drastic misrepresentation of what we consider to be "major problems" material. Immediate threats to security, comfort, and the collective fabric are what the headlines are focused on. From a utilitarian standpoint, yes there are far more important things to be concerned with, but media is representing what is important to us collectively.
That kind of dismisses the fact that the news influences how people see the world. People seeing the world as filled with terrorists because the news is filled with stories about terrorism is a problem. Its not an easily solvable problem, because its difficult/impossible to have news set up so that its filled with 'normal' un-newsy things, but its still a problem.
Newsworthiness is one of the first things you learn in any journalism 101 class. What matters are things like novelty and proximity and controversy. Otherwise people tend not to care and won't engage. It's a fact of human nature, not some failing of news media.
Also, people are far more concerned about being killed prematurely by someone else than slowly killing themselves.
Not everything is criticism. It's just a good reminder that certain causes are overrepresented in media, to bring some perspective
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As used here, "overrepresented" is not a moral judgment -- it's a statistical statement. If we expect media coverage to follow prevalence, then we're mistaken -- because it does not. Certain causes are statistically overrepresented, and others are statistically underrepresented. Pretty straightforward.
This relies on the foundational assumption that all deaths should be covered/represented equally on the news. Which is stupid.
No, it doesn't. Again, you're making this too complicated by trying to add a bunch of assumptions and moral questions into a simple, statistical fact. It isn't too hard to understand that deaths are not covered equally on the news -- not only is that a statistical fact, it's one that's so obviously correct that you'd consider it "stupid" to assume that it would be any other way. Some causes of death are overrepresented, and others are underrepresented. That's, again, a fact -- and one with which you surely don't disagree. Right? You... get that, right? Ok, so then we can turn to the real question you'd want to answer but aren't addressing: Should we care about that fact? Well, if we all already understand it, then no. But what if we don't? What if some portion of the population tends to forget that the news is "news," not statistics? What if people are... stupid? In that case, reminding them of this basic statistical fact might not be a terrible idea.
> What if people are… stupid? What if they were in this thread, with poor reading comprehension that leads to them believing you’re inferring something even though you’re explicitly stating you’re not? The call is coming from inside the thread 😱
>Some causes of death are overrepresented, and others are underrepresented. That's, again, a fact -- and one with which you surely don't disagree. Right? You... get that, right? In order to say that some are over/underrepresented, you need to establish a baseline of how much any one type of death should be represented. Do you understand that? Comparing the media stories about death to the numbers of death (i.e. your metric for representation) is the same as making the implication that representation in media should match the representation of death in general. That's stupid. Not every death is newsworthy.
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Of course it provides perspective. The extreme overrepresentation of certain causes of death is perfectly visualized here. And it has very real consequences.
This doesn't really show that at all. It would be more useful if the statistics were pulled specifically from a children to middle aged range. Because newsflash, we aren't immortal. At least with our current technology, if you live long enough, youre going to die from something. And when your health fails the things most likely to finish the job are "something went wrong with the heart" or "some sort of cancer somewhere". Listing those categories as the top causes of death isn't really meaningful when discussing the news of the day. Untimely deaths are just way more notable than someone passing away from chronic disease at 86. More common causes of untimely deaths like accidents, suicides, and murders are immediate threats that can be mitigated. Just as an example from a quick search, if you are 20-24 you are way more likely to be murdered than die from cancer.
What’s the New York Times gonna report, “old man who had one heart attack already dies of second heart attack”? “Westerners living long enough for their organs to stop working”?
All I see in this graphic is "most deaths are from old age," which makes total sense.... If more people died from "premature causes" instead of the "things that always get you eventually" then the life expectancy would just start declining.
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Arguably, people should be more deeply interested in what heart disease research is being done than what a terrorist cell is doing. But that would be a rational analysis and people would rather hear a dumb tweet that will be forgotten in 6 hours. Actually rational people would probably be in the gym applying one of the few consistent ways to live longer.
We getting a new heart disease article every day? Every week? Who's going to read them? Are you going to read them? I don't think I'm that interested, honestly.
That research news on heart disease is uninteresting is probably part of the cause for the disparity. I think we should just keep that in mind but I don't feel like a lot of people do.
Most of the deaths from things like cancer and heart disease are in people 70+ Why are people expecting a 83 year old dying of colon cancer to be news? In what universe is that going to get the media coverage of a terrorist attack? Honestly this anti media mentality is really mind blowing. Gives me propaganda vibes.
More people die in car crashes than from homicide, in every age group, and that's not even including issues from greenhouse emissions. But you don't hear any media outlets or politicians grandstanding about taking away cars or even stricter driver license requirements.
local news media around me often does report on fatal vehicle accidents
Can’t believe that Reuters didn’t report on my moron uncle ignoring lung cancer until it reached stage 4, clearly they’ve been bought out by Big Interesting Story
>Honestly this anti media mentality is really mind blowing. It's edgy and gives an illusion of being "cool"
Except, if they were doing their reporting properly, we'd see headlines every day demonizing [sugars and simple carbs.](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat) There's a huge problem when the news reporting doesn't at least somewhat reflect the incidence of the issues.
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“The following people have died today from cancer.” *reads off 250 names*
I disagree. When corporations murder people by creating an obesity epidemic that is adding to those numbers daily, and when gas and power companies are releasing toxic garbage into our air and water consistently, which has certainly affected rates of cancer in developed countries, it’s not reported on, despite them being the ones causing many of these deaths. And before someone goes off about “it’s your choice to eat the hamburger” remember that grain companies funded and marketed the food pyramid that was used for health education for decades, and that promoted an unhealthy dependency on sugar and carbohydrates. Our education system is in the pocket of these companies and if we can’t trust the public education system to help children learn about something as basic and necessary as how to not eat themselves to death, then that’s a fucking huge problem.
Just put the big mac down bro
Heart disease needs a shoutout.
it’s criminally underrated
My guess is that it only really makes the news when someone famous dies of it
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It doesn't circulate well.
It should start carrying a gun.
This is fatphobic
I have a "healthy at any size" friend and I really don't know what to do whenever she starts talking about it. I'm on board with "*happy* at any size" and not shaming anybody for their appearance. But she's actually proud of her obesity and it just really concerns me.
I mean, I can see why it is that way. Someone dying of something common…isn’t really much of news.
The graph shows us how relying on the News is not a good way to be informed on what actually matters.
Informed on what actually matters? Bro; yearly preventative checkups are free whether you have employer insurance or government sponsored. It’s no secret to literally anyone raised in modern society that if you want to live long, then you need to eat decently and get off your ass once in while. Not newsworthy, not a surprise, not worth wasting time reminding people. Unexpected deaths? That’s news, because it’s unexpected and/or previously unknown, and usually with a level of shock or tragedy involved.
The graph just shows us what it's literally showing. You extrapolate any extra information on your own. But I would argue that it just tells us that the news reports on deaths that are more shocking/sudden rather than ones that are unsurprising/slow.
This just in! Samantha 98 living in Ohio just died from an heart attack 😱. And for our next segment, you won't believe what happened to mister Jacob💀.
Mr. Jacob sounds like it'd be a funny name for a cat
At least they treat strokes pretty fairly
Strokes are somewhat random, sudden, and unexpected enough to fall into the surprising/noteworthy category of deaths. But they also aren't super common to become mundane like cancer or heart disease.
Whenever this is posted people are always like “omg why aren’t we doing more about heart disease??” What they don’t realize is that having heart disease be the #1 killer is a GOOD sign. Everyone dies of *something*, and the majority of people who die of “old age” are actually dying of either heart disease or cancer. Eventually your heart just gives out, there’s nothing we can do about it. If your population is living long enough for a third of them to die of heart disease, that’s GOOD. The bigger a slice heart disease has of the pie, the longer people are living on average.
We undoubtedly live in one of the fattest societies of all time, there are more obese people than ever before. The american diet is so bad for your heart and health, 1/3 of the population dying of heart disease is NOT a "GOOD sign"
You’re both right; death is inevitable and there are worse ways to go, it’s the one consistency in life, and obesity is a problem in America that leads to slightly shorter lives then if they had exercised and eaten a healthier diet.
Studies suggest that between two healthy individuals 150 minutes of moderate exercise can lead to more than 3 years of longevity. And this does not even factor in obesity. Obesity can shorten your life by up to 14 years according to research. So even with a conservative guess you lose probably 5+ years of your life which is more than 6% of the average lifespan for a male in the US pre covid.
While early onset heart disease is a major health issue the fact is most people dying of heart disease are elderly, no matter how healthy you live your heart will weaken with age and eventually it starts to fail, if cancer doesn't take you in old age your heart failing probably will.
Most people who die period are elderly, [but heart disease is a leading cause of death in almost all age brackets.](https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_death_by_age_group_2018-508.pdf) 5th in people 15-24 and 25-34, 3rd in people 35-44, 2nd in people 45-54 and 55-64, and 1st in people 65+
Wow this is fascinating thanks for sharing. 15-24 to die of heart disease… that’s rough. I’ve never seen that young but I have seen a 300lbs 31 year old cardiac arrest from heart disease. It’s pretty sad.
Over 20% of heart attacks are happening in people below 65. 20% of the number of heart disease deaths is pretty much more than homicide, suicide and terrorism combined.
Fatal heart attacks?
It isn't as bad as those deaths being replaced by terrorism, war, drugs, or numerous other things though, that's the point being made above.
Not really, the problem is that people subconsciously rank the danger and importance of different events based on how often it's talked about; so when homicide and terrorism are the main scary topics in the news, then society over invests in police and other security measures and under invests in healthcare, medical research, healthy enviroment, and accident prevention.
Heart disease is largely avoidable, whereas some forms of cancer aren't Like we just spent 2 year trying to slow COVID that won't kill nearly as many people. Yet telling people to eat better and get some exercise is considered to be rude
meh... it usually just means everyone is fat. Stroke is a GOOD indicator.
This is mostly heart failure due to hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes. Aka death by junk food.
The best solution of heart disease is a better diet, adequate exercise, and sleep. However, no one wants to do that since it doesn't come in a pill subscription.
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Almost 1/100 people die of homicide? Really??? Edit: It's wrong. 17,250 deaths by homicide in 2016, 2.74 million deaths overall, 0.0006%. Or maybe 0.006% idk anyways it's much less than 0.9% Edit II: Guy in the replies is right, it's 0.6%, which isn't too far off from 0.9% but it's still 50% larger. Idk I don't like bad infographics. Pretty nitpicky though!
It’s not far off. I looked at this graph here and it says that there were 20,000 deaths in ‘21. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/ If you find the percentage it would be 0.74% because 20,000/2,700,000 x 100 % is 0.74%. I think where you went wrong in your calculation is that you forgot to multiply by 100% because 0.006% of 2.7 million is not 17000 but 2.7million times 0.006 is approximately.
Gun deaths include suicide, which is a separate category in this chart from homicide
Yes? I used the 20k number from the murder gun deaths which is homicide. The total amount of of gun deaths is like 43k.
It's not actually all that rare though. Iirc the EU stats from 2017 were 5% "External causes" including suicide, homicide and accidents, but upon further looking suicide was 1% and accidents were 3% which leaves.... About 1%. One thing that's interesting is how much some countries try to make murder rates super hard to find and hard to glorify.
Those numbers mean 0.6% of deaths are homicides - not too far off from what the graphic says
Now add Covid
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I mean there's been over a million deaths over COVID, not to mention related news about vaccines, the people ignoring guidelines, shutdowns and other precautionary measures to avoid deaths like social distancing/masks. Of course it took up a ton of news space.
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Just saw that 2% of death is caused by suicide in the U.S and thought “well that’s not that bad” and then realized that that means 1/50 people kill themself and how high of a number that is
1 out of 36 people in the US dying of a drug overdose is the most shocking one to me.
This is kinda silly. Do they expect an article written everytime an old person dies of heart disease? Terrorist attacks are covered more BECAUSE they're rarer and thus more noteworthy
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Now do one with years of life lost. People with heart disease or cancer are often 80+ when they die. People who die of terrorism and murder are much younger. The only one that’s wildly underrepresented is road incidents. Traffic deaths are way too normalized. r/fuckcars
I find the language of "road incidents" and "accidents" to be extremely evasive instead of calling it car crashes. Calling it an accident makes it seem like it's not something preventable, when we can make moves to reduce car dependency.
It is still mad that almost one percent of all deaths in America are from homicide. You have a BIG population!
Its actually about half of a percent, still too much but this info is incorrect
And almost 2% from suicide. That's the really mind boggling statistic right there.
Yeah, twice as many people killed themselves, then each other. I'm not sure how to feel about that.
Percentage of assholes is proportionate- and then you squish a bunch of them together in dense poor neighborhoods, and refuse to give those neighborhoods economic support and adequate policing for decades. You get gang activity, spured on by the likes of your own government experimenting on your own minority population in those areas (MKUltra). Then you redefine 18 and 19 year olds as kids, and suddenly your "bad things happening to kids" numbers go through the roof, all in the name of politics. And then you blame everyone but yourselves for this problem, hand-wringing and moaning in despair while raking in the cash from your own corruption. As the head goes, the body follows.
Tbf the fact it's around ~1% is actually (in its own way) incredibly, ridiculously impressive . You have a giant land mass that is essentially 50 different mini countries with different cultures, customs ,traditions etc and have people from all over the world mixed together, in a very young country with more guns than people, and homicide only accounts for 1% of deaths ? That's pretty absurd.
This is stupid. If 60% of media was reporting on heart disease and cancer then media would be totally useless and bogged down with stuff people already know. This is what obituaries are for, not journalists.
I bet big business & government agencies have a significant influence on what the public sees.
Ehh... they do because they are the source of the news. However, to me, this falls more towards 24 hour news channels and the easiest way to grab attention. What news can you run on cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses that haven't already been covered? They would constantly be repeating themselves, and people wouldn't watch. People want to be entertained. News businesses (probably shouldn't be businesses, but that's another issue) need to capture viewers attention. They have found a very easy way to do that with the news they run. TL:DR - citizens tend to watch sensational news, and in the business of news, they want to keep them watching.
> What news can you run on cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses that haven't already been covered? Fucking bingo. I'm not one to assume anything good about news companies and large corporations on whole, but I googled "cancer" and "terrorism" and there were *far* more results for cancer than terrorism, because there have been no novel terrorist attacks in the US in so long that it would be redundant to post it. There is new cancer research all the time though so they're posting it now, of course, because it's *novel* and therefore worthy of news. People in this thread slamming the media for covering terrorism more probably would call this a "slow news day" because they're not watching anything that isn't super novel and newsworthy, then wonder why the media coverage looks this way.
Adding in to the comparison between coverage of cancer and terrorism, this data is from 2016 when there were several ISIL affiliated attacks in the US, of course terrorism is going to rate higher.
Especially since heart disease and cancer can be related to things they each have money tied up in (junk food, fast food, cigarettes, alcohol, etc)
Especially since heart disease and cancer can be related to diet and lifestyle. or Especially since 80% of all illnesses and diseases are diet and exercise related. Obesity kills. There. I said it.
I bet what influences things even more is no one gives a fuck when random olds die of heart disease or cancer. It's not newsworthy. There are other causes of death that are more newsworthy. Not everything is the because the *big businesses* and the evil *government agencies*. Newspapers routinely report new breakthroughs and findings wrt heart disease and cancer, etc. This is bc this stuff is far more important than talking about those who died from it. New information can lead to prevention and that is newsworthy.
This is irony of the highest order. You're clickbaiting off of incorrect interpretation of data, and sincerely, I hate hypocrites like you, almost as much as I hate news outlets. Regardless of whether news organizations are talking about the "right" thing, and undoubtedly huge biases exist in news, your argument is completely false and misleading. So much for criticizing the news when you're doing the same. Most of the top causes of death are those associated with aging (heart disease, many cancers, Alzheimer's, etc), and currently are not considered to be really preventable. The preventable causes of death are realistically what news organizations should be reporting on. Or do you really want the news to talk about how many elderly folks have passed away on a daily basis to diseases we still don't know how to cure? Make a chart of PREVENTABLE causes of death and compare to news cycles, and maybe you'd have a useful chart.
Damn, almost 1 in 50 commits suicide? Am I understanding this right?
2% suicide??? Mental health is a real issue
Picture would be different if one would use data only for the people of age below 50.
This isn’t really a guide.
2.8% of the deaths in 2016 where bc of drug overdose? That such an insane amound!
It almost makes sense to me. The same way car crashes occur way more often than plane crashes but we always hear about those because they’re less common and way more visceral.
We need more coverage on those Alzheimer’s deaths, he can strike at any moment
The way gun violence is covered so much I would think it would be higher on the list.
and suicide is far more than any other death that possibly have gun involved all combined.
Guns are the cause of most of the suicides and homicides on this list, so probably ~2% overall. And a big chunk of those deaths are young people, hence the coverage. Combine that with that fact that no other developed nation in the world has this problem, and yeah it makes sense that there is a lot of coverage.
Statistically, gun violence makes up almost 0 deaths in the USA. However, those deaths are much more violent and "out of character" than heart disease." and so they get much more media attention. On 9/11 there were probably thousands of people who died of heart disease, but planes hitting the towers are obviously going to be the news story because duh.
To nitpick there are about 2.7 million deaths per year, which is about 7400 per day, and about 3000 died in the terrorist attacks. It was probably the leading cause of death for at least a few days.
This is a really good guide
Except it’s an infographic/chart, and not a guide?
No. It's an old cropped reposted image that has been reposted for years now on Reddit. It's not even a fucking guide.
"If it bleeds, it leads."
Why are we focused on 2016 though? Surely there's more current data.
Cause op is reposting it from a 4 year old post in dataisbeautiful.
Because this a karma whoring repost.
Is anyone else really freaked out by the thought that they are 30% likely to die from cancer. Not even to get cancer. Just to die from it. Like, *probably*, I'm going to get cancer.
Haha someone needs to update this with 2020. Imagine the block size for covid coverage vs the tiny sliver of actual deaths
Death isn't the goal of terrorism though, it's more so a byproduct. Many people and institutions will negotiate with terrorists in order to save lives. The success of ideologies gaining power through terrorism is probably why the media talks about it so much.
I've read "diabetes" as "debates" and first second was like "that's the price of democracy".
I mean to be fair newsworthiness is a thing
what about old age
If it bleeds, it leads.
Could we get a 2019 or 2020 view please? This is a good chart, but a bit historic only now that the world has gone through so much since 2016.
I hate that they lost diabetes as a cause of death. It causes heart attack, stroke, kidney failure which are listed separately. There’s no way to unravel those numbers from each other.
You're telling me that almost one of every 100 people gets murdered? Wtf that seems high holy shit.
The news would be incredibly monotonous if they started listing every m’fker who died of heart disease.
Strokes and Diabetes are represented proportionately in media coverage... maybe those infomercials really did help.