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[-] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 76 points 5 months ago

Its really bothering me that 2.1% was listed above 2.2% at the suicide covid bars.

[-] Zachariah@lemmy.world 31 points 5 months ago

The 2.1 was 2.19 truncated.
The 2.2 was 2.18 rounded.

[-] tyler@programming.dev 9 points 5 months ago
[-] Zachariah@lemmy.world 40 points 5 months ago

I have no idea, unfortunately

[-] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 34 points 5 months ago

"Joe Boomer, 85, chronic smoker and alcoholic, dies of heart attack, none of his family were surprised." is not exactly an intresting article to read lol.

[-] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

Exactly. People want drama so crimes are more often reported by the media.

[-] vane@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Live 85 years as a smoker and alcoholic - I will take it as a win.

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[-] lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago

Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news.

[-] turboSnail@piefed.europe.pub 10 points 5 months ago

In other news: The obese Tom from next door got a heart attack and died. The 84-year-old grandma from across the street is still in hospital, and the cancer is getting worse. Stay tuned to find out if she is still alive tomorrow.

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[-] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Heart disease, cancer, etc are part of the plan. Both boring and too close to home. Terrorism and homicide are suitably scary, morally charged, and far enough removed from most people's lives to be mostly abstract fears.

[-] borkborkbork@piefed.social 6 points 5 months ago

Heart disease, cancer, etc are part of the plan.

exactly. they can't exactly have you all worried about the byproducts of their industries. Worry about that guy who's different, don't care about the planet we're burning

[-] Maxxie@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)
[-] exaybachae@startrek.website 32 points 5 months ago

Fear mongering and sensatislism vs educational and beneficial programming.

How we are taught to stop terrorism and homicides, give more power to police and authority figures.

How one actually stops terrorism and homicides, better educate people and provide them with higher quality social and health services. Which ironically result in more preventative care and less deaths from the treatable diseases that are underreported.

Eat this, not that.

[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

Another way to look at something is newsworthiness. If it's something that's super common, it isn't remarkable enough to make the news.

I don't want to live in a world where terrorism is so common it isn't even worth talking about on the news.

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Yeah 5 dead from a shooting at an American school is local news. At an Australian school it's international news.

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[-] shane@feddit.nl 26 points 5 months ago

I wonder how the comparison would look if you compared years lost per type of death?

That is, old people die of heart disease and cancer. Young people die of accidents and violence.

[-] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 23 points 5 months ago

I'm assuming that 40 of the 42% of homicide coverage was that one CEO.

[-] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 9 points 5 months ago

It's not a homicide if they aren't human

[-] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Now now, they are human, just not humane.

They are also psychopaths.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 5 months ago

A disproportionate amount, anyway. And then there's homicides that only get covered locally as well, because it's just some poor person.

[-] nucleative@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago

On the left: shit happens

On the right: humans are doing stupid shit

I think the OP is trying to express that the New York times is distorting the news. Perhaps true, but humans doing stupid shit will always sell a newspaper.

[-] floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 months ago

Yeah, I also don't think writing an article every time someone dies from cancer or a heart attack would benefit anyone.

[-] thejml@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 months ago

I feel like hearing more kids dying with ass cancer stories and heart disease deaths and people dying from preventable diseases stories would probably shift people away from focusing just on guns and homicide and maybe actually cause people to care about science and solving those other things.

Not that those are good to not focus on, just that there's already an ongoing anti vs pro gun conversation going and at least if we talk about something else that's proportional causing deaths... well, I doubt there are many "pro-cancer" people out there (but I know it's non-zero).

I guess I just want some positive momentum on something at this point.

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[-] logi@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

It doesn't have to be an accusation of distortion. Can also just be a reminder that every day reality is not what we read in the paper or see in movies.

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[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

At first sight it seems to me that the coverage being positivelly correlated with how unusual a death is and the number of people dying in a single event, would explain that graph.

I bet if we dig into the details of the Accidents class we would see a pattern were uncommon kinds of accidents and/or those with a large number of deaths ("man killed by falling crane", "plane crash") get lots of coverage whilst common kinds of accidents with few victims per event ("a car crash involving a single car") get a lot less coverage.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 5 months ago

Yeah, it's not a conspiracy. They sell clicks, or "public interest" if you want to be generous. It's just that in doing so, they present a scary, distorted version of the world.

[-] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

1% homicide is still 3.4 million people.

Natural causes will never be news, except when a major medical breakthrough occurs. It's simply not interesting to the population.

[-] Lord743@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago

1% of deaths, not the total population.

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[-] thesohoriots@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

It’d be neat to see some other news outlets as well. I’m sure there’s a massive difference.

[-] foodandart@lemmy.zip 11 points 5 months ago

I doubt it.

NGL.. let's be real here.

Your average New York Joe Blowhole who's 67, obese, diabetic and smoked since he was 15 isn't going to be as newsworthy a story as a murder is, the day he drops dead of a heart attack in his living room.

Outside of the obit a family member puts in the paper, why would the newspapers report on such an everyday death?

Natural causes of death, are ho-hum.

The newspapers report on the things that aren't the run-of-the-mill, occurrences.

[-] thesohoriots@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

True, but/and let’s consider something like a more conservative outlet (relative to NYT) in 2023. Who’s president? What issues are getting talked up pre-election? I’m guessing we’ll see something like drugs and homicide taking a massive chunk of the news relative to what the NYT reported. Even regional news will differ — ever turn on the daytime news in Las Vegas? It’s all car chases and interviews with shooting witnesses. You’d think nothing else happened in the world. Just an interesting experiment.

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[-] pdxfed@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Fucking great visual.

Would be interesting to see it in a stacked bar graph with actual va. represented side by side to give scale to the disproportionism.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 5 months ago

On the one hand, I get this, what's unexpected is more interesting and newsworthy, but at the same time I do see how it creates problems. Airplane travel is much safer than cars, but people feel unsafe in planes. Part of it is because you aren't personally in control, sure, but a lot of it is definitely the availability hueristic*. Especially following things like the September 11th attacks and Malaysian Airlines planes going missing.

But a major issue with it is that it leads to us viewing things like car accidents (and heart disease and cancer) as inevitable and a mere fact of life we can't do anything about. Meanwhile whenever there is an airplane crash it's very thoroughly investigated and will likely lead to changes in regulations.

*: I may be getting the name wrong.

[-] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 3 points 5 months ago

I have a really hard time with drug overdose being it's own thing. That sounds a lot like ignoring the large number of intentional overdoses that happen.

[-] The2b@lemmy.vg 3 points 5 months ago

Why is COVID (2.2%) below Suicide (2.1%) on the graph on the left? Everything else is in decending order of occurance

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

politics equals more views on MSM, and newspapers. homicides/terrorism is part of that, so is drugs. just like how they dont really report on climate change, or disease.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Climate change headlines do come through sometimes, when a grim new milestone is reached, or something is discovered that was worse than expected.

[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

And now let's see how much outside of the "homicide" and "terrorism" on the right bar are celebrities!

[-] Mossheart@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

What about shootings? I don't believe that shootings doesn't make this chart for a second.

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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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