Almost everybody will eventually die from one of this laundry list of items if they get old enough, regardless of where they live.

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?

Whereas murders and school shootings and such, can each have their own, big or small story.

At worst, the US has like 2x the obesity rate (and related deaths) compared to a place like Germany or France. But there's hardly any scarcity of news reports around health issues like obesity, or cancer either. Health coverage, health scares, health influencing, health fads, health supplements, diets, etc, are a trillion dollar industry.

Not all countries have such big homicide rates - most western countries have like 1/5th or less. 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.

At the same time, total death factors are not that interesting. Everyone of us will die one day, and it might be assigned to various organs failing first.

What matters more is causes of death as a function of age:

https://flowingdata.com/mortality/

TV stations are out to make money, not to inform society. All their programming, news included, is designed to attract eyeballs, hence money, and sadly sensationalist and titillating stories is what most people want to see.

- All newscasts featured crime more than anything else ("if it bleeds it leads").

- All newscasts had a local feel-good story.

- All newscasts had weather (although East Coast and Midwest stations spent more time on it).

- All newscasts had a local sports update

But what was most interesting was what they spend the rest of their time on:

- 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.

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

I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss. For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.

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. This difference explains why some cities that feel safe actually have a high homicide rate and vice-versa. In some cities crime is unpredictable whereas in others it is more confined to areas where visitors rarely travel.

Basically: If something is in the news, it's rare enough that you don't have to worry about it. Once the news stops reporting on it, that's when you worry.

The news in a vacuum can actually be quite misleading and I too believe people should realize that it is not the ‘whole’ truth.

Everyone dies and everyone knows that everyone dies. I’m not really interested in how I’m going to die of old age, but what I have to worry about today to avoid an early death.

I think there’s probably still a difference in media reporting and probability but i’m guessing younger people 20-30 are most likely to die from vehicle accidents, accidents, suicide and drugs? I’m not sure though and I don’t have any evidence.

So I've started talking to friends recently about their weight and how excess body fat significantly contributes towards numerous cancers.

It's been interesting.

The last group I brought it up with steered the conversation towards "all bodies are beautiful bodies" which is true but ... GAH! ... basically the entire western world is in denial about health and diet.

The corporations are fueling this fire, partly I'm sure through steering mainstream media to avoid certain talking points.

How many of you here actually knew that being overweight contributes to dozens of early onset cancers? Be honest.

You can't survive on alcohol, chips and cigarettes... but because people seem to be able to do that for a few decades, everybody just shrugs off health and thinks "I'll be fine".

Because they have an actor and an object, both with identities, they inherently have stories, which are the product that the news media ultimately produces.

It's harder to tell a story about someone (or even many people) dying of heart disease because there is no "doer".

Assuming no agenda and honest representation of known facts, this will already bias coverage. But since we know many news outlets have agendas and don't honestly represent known facts, this tendency is amplified further.

Old people dying of heart disease or cancer or whatever is not actionable. Sure, we can do lifestyle changes, but eventually old people have to die of something and its in one of those buckets anyways.

Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700).

Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film.

It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed.

This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception.

What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.

* get exercise (literally any amount is great)

* don't eat more than you should (avoid being overweight)

I wish we could do the same with Cancer.

California proceeded to elevate the signal-to-noise ratio so high on Cancer however, and it got scooped up in advertising there really is not any really good general advice. Every couple of years theres various trends or crusades for some minority substance that is never scientifically compared to outcomes or risk. Nearly everything could cause cancer, but the nearly everything also wont. Maybe it's just too broad?

Terrorism is even worse because there’s the perception that murder is mostly something that happens to gangsters and drug dealers while terrorism could happen to the average suburbanite minding their own business.

But also terrorism has more potential - say if they got their hands on a dirty bomb or released a viral pathogen - and that’s more terrifying to people as well. It’s the same with nuclear energy: on average coal kills a lot more, but in an absolute worst case scenario nuclear would overtake the total coal death toll.

The news isn't supposed to be representative cross-section of reality. If it was, 99.9% of the newscast would be "most people went to work today, fed their family, went home and slept." The news is there to tell you the outliers of today's events.

I wish we treated this like the outright emergency it is.

I see what I consider, I guess spin, on reports on oakland. Like:

* Violent crime rose between 2018 and 2023, though it was lower than the peak in 1992.

What does it matter if it was worse in 1992? To the people leaving in Oakland say from 2010 to 2023, it's going up. They don't care if it was worse in 1992. That's irrelevant data to try to make you feel better about the fact that things are getting worse. They care that they are less safe than before.

There's a buncn more but the point is, it's possible crime all over is down and crime in places many people live is up.

But if people starts to behead teachers (as it’s happening in my country : France) for religious reasons, I want to know.

Yea, even if it represents a few deaths here and there.

Because I am willing to consider the possibility that it’s telling of a shift in my society that will have consequences down the road.

Significance of events are not necessarily correlated to how many people die from it.

Also different countries set up different priorities. France for example is talking quite a lot about « feminicide » (how many women are killed because they are women). In France, it was 137 in 2024. Is it a lot? Probably not for a population of 70 millions. Can we significantly decrease the number? Probably not.

But people and media are still talking about it. And even if this specific number do not improve, it does spark debate about related topic, which is sometimes a good thing.

https://baltimoretimes-online.com/news/2024/05/10/johns-hopk...

However, about 1000 people a week die in car accidents which almost never makes the news. I doubt the majority of those are either elderly or non-preventable. I feel this should get attention but never does.

So I think you need to look at "early" deaths, since those are the ones that are in theory "preventable". I'm not sure where to draw the line in terms of age -- maybe 65?

We then start to see a much clearer picture of the deaths that we actually care about, and the ones that we can potentially do something about to minimize.

While it would be nice for those who are 80 to live until they are 90, I'd argue that it's much more important to help those who are 50 live until they are 80.

Standard American Diet (high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, high processed) -> high visceral fat deposits -> Type 2 diabetes -> tissue glycation -> heart disease

In the UK the figure appears to be much lower if I have understood the ONS report correctly (link to spreadsheet top right).

I'm wondering at the disparity and where it comes from. Real or an artifact of definitions in use when certifying deaths?

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

(scroll down in the spreadsheet for the figures for all people in England and Wales, the first table is non-residents only)

I, therefore, think a slightly different question would be more interesting/telling: 'What Americans who read the news reports die from vs what the news reports on'

This would demonstrate any gap between informing people of things which are relevant to them vs hyperbole.

Shark attacks and lightning strikes are dramatic but they don't seem to bias as much. Rare diseases have the potential to be sensationalist too.

Terrorism almost never makes the news where I live; the closest is assassinations, especially linked to political figures.

If there was a movement against some sugar tycoon, I bet diabetes deaths would suddenly top the news. I'd be interested in how often Tesla accidents are covered by the news.

Personally, the "poisonings" between 15 and 35 are what I most care about as a parent.

A pet peeve of mine is the fact that any word can now be an emotion. "Informed" is not an emotion. It's is a state you reach on your way to a base emotion that is dictated by what you've just been informed about.

It would be interesting to have a form of media which attempts to report on reality in direct proportion to occurrences instead, but it wouldn’t draw attention so very few would use it.

Go to hell with your political indoctrination on hackernews ... go to reddit with such stupid posts.

People should be raving and screaming for faster rollout of self-driving cars. If self-driving cars were an experimental drug undergoing a clinical trial, they would cancel the trial at this point because it would be unethical to continue denying the drug to the control group.

1. voters mark paper ballots 2. observers from all parties watch the counting 3. results are tallied publicly

Yes, this is very much feasible; and no, this is not the right domain to be ingeniously efficient and cost sensitive. US being the richest country in the world or some such, etc..

Take the hep b vaccine as an example. ". . . if a child gets infected with hepatitis B in the first 12 months of life, their chance of going on to develop cerosis or liver cancer is about 90%." (Dr. Paul Offit in Beyond the Noise #82: Jumping without a net https://youtu.be/7pxJb7ANWkc?si=EflkB6VaOx6onP5D)

Right now, the CDC recommends the birth dose of the vaccine. And yet the ACIP (CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) is expected to delay the birth dose of the hep B vaccine following the president's statement in September that the vax is unnecessary and therefore be delayed to age 12.

I would expect the media to be talking about this. According to the Hepatitis B Foundation, "Hepatitis B, the world’s leading cause of liver cancer, continues to impose a staggering, but preventable, burden on individuals and healthcare systems alike. Without widespread prevention and early intervention, the U.S. is projected to spend more than $44.8 million by 2050 on hepatitis B-related care." (https://www.hepb.org/assets/Uploads/Cost-of-Hep-B.pdf)

So we have a practice that can prevent the cancer, save money, and improve lives and the government may totally ignore science and change the vax schedule. Dr. Offit did say in the video that he expects doctors to still provide the vaccine to patients and counsel parents on the need for it.

If a major news network reports that ACIP delays the first dose to 12, will they also interview experts? Will parents, grandparents, social workers, early learning professionals, policy wonks, and legislators know to ask questions, have the time or capacity to deal with this at the state level?

I would like to believe in people. It's getting harder and harder (on a population level).

For example, we do want terrorism over-represented relative to old-age-deaths. However, a responsible and self-aware media would really attempt to counteract 'availability bias' -- e.g. that due to the human mind what is repeated we tend to assume is actually more prevalent. But we don't have wise institutions at the moment.

The more general problem is that it is hard to quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which media fails at fulfilling its complex societal role, because it is a qualitative failure in general, although we can poke at it's edges for sure (e.g. fearmongering language probably has gone up, as has polarization on both sides of the aisle, and the amount of information-free 'babbling and speculating' in the immediate aftermath of some event has likely gone up over time).

I'd _like_ to blame the reader -- inferring anything about how common something is based on how often it's reported is unreasonable. But readers do make that inference, and writers shouldn't pretend they don't know it.

And for most of us nowadays it's not about articles and writers. It's about eight-second video clips on TikTok and creators. So I don't have any hope that we'll become better informed.

„The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.“

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

> . People are often far more anxious about flying than driving, even though commercial airline crashes are incredibly rare.

...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.

The way the article phrases it, makes it sound like the fear is completely baseless.

Or am I the only one feeling about it this way?

In US the number is larger than drug overdoses. Over 100k preventable deaths a year attributable to anti-vaccine hysteria/conspiracy theories.

It is not news that people die. Everybody dies. You who are reading this is going to die. I am going to die. Every person you have ever heard of and not heard of is going to die.

Terrorism and homicide are not natural causes of death, and naturally upsetting and naturally newsworthy.

Unless the authors of the article want the news to make headlines that people die of natural causes, then we can only interpret it that they want to tone down deaths by homicide and terrorism and try to paint those happenings as "no big deal". Which might very well be the cause among the sick dimension of top academia.