https://substack.com/@fixthenews/note/c-176602244
"A new analysis shows exactly how news organisations have engineered that
feeling, and the distortion is worse than you think.
Hannah Ritchie and her colleagues at
Our World in Data tracked every article
published by the
New York Times,
Washington Post and
Fox News in 2023,
and compared their coverage to what Americans actually die from. What they
found is obscene.
Heart disease and cancer together accounted for 56% of deaths in America. They
received 7% of the media coverage. Terrorism killed 16 people in the US that
year. Sixteen. It got more attention than heart disease, cancer, stroke,
Alzheimer’s, diabetes, kidney disease, and liver disease combined. In fact,
terrorism received 18,000 times more coverage than its share of deaths.
Homicides were overrepresented by a factor of 43.
The reason is obvious once you see it. Heart disease kills 2,000 Americans
every single day, which means it isn’t news, because it isn’t new. Tomorrow’s
headline is always identical to today’s. People who die from chronic conditions
are just numbers, which is why they end up buried in reports. People who die in
rare, violent events become stories, with faces and names, and we click on
those stories, which tells the outlets to publish more of them.
Of course, this has been going on for a long time. William Randolph Hearst
coined the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads” back in the 1890s, during the days
of yellow journalism.
What’s different now however, is that we get the news in real time in our
pockets from everywhere - not just the morning paper - and so we’re drowning in
an endless stream of death and disaster that makes the world feel far more
dangerous than it actually is.
I’ve said this 1,000 times before, but it’s always worth repeating: the
headlines don’t tell you what’s happening in the world. They tell you what’s
dramatic, rare, and cheap enough to turn into a story. Which means that if
you’re after an accurate picture of what’s getting worse, or what’s improving,
you’ll need to look somewhere other than the news."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
