How people die vs. media coverage of death(owenshen24.github.io) |
How people die vs. media coverage of death(owenshen24.github.io) |
Are there studies that compare media coverage with surveys on how people think we die?
> Two kinds of bias were identified: (a) a tendency to overestimate small frequencies and underestimate larger ones, and (b) a tendency to exaggerate the frequency of some specific causes and to underestimate the frequency of others, at any given level of objective frequency
Humans are intuitively better at it. For example, it would be impossible to predict something like 911 event with such frequentist analysis.
Also impossible to predict some sort of nuclear disaster terrorist act that never happened before and could take a million lives.
Another thing to keep in mind is the "missing life" (dying young) and quality of life after disease. That's why something like Alzheimer's seems a lot worse than heart disease.
I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction!
I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process.
^_^
That said, it seems like the modern short news cycle has edged out attention being paid to long term trends (kidney disease mortality prevalence was surprising to me as well).
I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it!
One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all?
Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?
I think there are more nuanced views that are worth expressing, as some commenters have already pointed out, for example, looking at years of life lost (i.e. controlling for age of death).
While I think the data we got was in broad strokes representative, I'd be curious to see what it looks like in other countries, as I'm wondering if cultural bias plays a large role.
I'm not too sure if I'll write many more blog posts exploring this dataset in the future; the data is all there on GitHub, though, if anyone else wants to play with it. :)
I briefly looked at all the charting libraries on this list here: https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-...
If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably use [Chartist](https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/) as out of all the libraries I looked at, it seems to be the easiest to get up and running.
While charts.js is a little more interactive, it was a little painful to get up and running.
The time slider is just an input slider some jQuery I wrote that dynamically loads up a new dataset and calls the redraw function in charts.js to load up a new chart.
Overall, as someone with entry-level experience in both manipulating data and web development, I found the overall process to be a little rough at first, but it got a lot better once I got the hang of the library.
In total, the entire website took me about a week, with 2 hours of work every day. So something like 15 hours, total?
The charting library I used (charts.js) didn't come with an easy way to have a time axis, so I rigged up some stuff with JQuery and a slider.
I guess something that could have helped with accessibility would have been a dropdown box instead to select the years.
Are you saying that dying of heart disease and cancer are over-diagnosed? Why does that matter in the context of this analysis? It's a comparison between CDC data and news coverage -- any "over-diagnosis" (or under-diagnosis) should be reflected in all datasets equally, so it doesn't really effect the overall review.
I care about gun violence and knew it was overreported, but it blew my mind to find out that there are about twice as many deaths per year from just asbestos are there are gun homicides. I wonder how many other misconceptions there are? (Total gun deaths is much higher due to suicide and accidents)
Gun suicides matter, but we might address those very differently from homicides.
Gang-related violence... I'm not sure why I'd exclude that? They're human beings. The term also is very unevenly applied and laws meant to target "gang-related violence" have a tendency to burden minorities more heavily. (See also: "terrorism")
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/how-do-you-defin...
A prime example is the American public's irrational fear of terrorism, which translates to pouring unfathomable amounts of tax dollars into the unending "war on terror". Meanwhile heart disease/cancer silently kills 1.1 million Americans every year.
The same thing could be said for the gun control narrative being pushed by the media and politicians. If gun deaths are classified as homicides and using CDC numbers, they account for less than 1% of deaths.
However, looking at the same data on the site for the Guardian and NYT, it looks like the wild west out there and homicides are the leading cause of death next to cancer.
If useful, I did a similar analysis, but just for the NY Times vs WHO/CDC (I manually tagged an year of articles by cause of death vs. this article's ability to see across many years):
In 2015-6, the deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
You can also extend the analysis to see how death coverage varies by region (those who are culturally similar to us get more coverage):
How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism: https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
All deaths are not equal. Most of old people die naturally from an heart failure or cancer, that the natural process of death. Homicides and accidents are not natural but common. Terrorism is an exception, that's why it so much covered.
100 old people dying from cancer do not worth 1 minute of press coverage, a family killed by a truck in a christmas market a bit more.
You are inundated with positive coverage of cars all over, they are vehemently supported in most pieces and comments. Pair that with;
Heart Disease 10.388 Under
Car Accidents 2.285 Under
Lower Respiratory Disease 3.520 UnderDoesn't that make sense? If diseases kill 1000x more people, they are not news -- they're same old, what has been going on since forever.
Now, if there a novel disease or epidemic, sure, that would get coverage.
[0] http://www.cuny.tv/show/sciencegoestothemovies/PR2006291
First, most people think their habits and diet are not leading them to a cardiovascular disease. Then, those conditions that primarily afflict a specific demographic. So it might not be as relevant to someone who is let's say, less than 40 years old.
You can't officially die of "old age" so if you avoid or survive everything else, eventually you are going die from cancer or heart disease. Problem is though, if you improve cancer treatment then more people will die of heart disease, and vice versa.
We really need a category for "died peacefully of advanced age", where we can try hard to increase the death rate.
A strong fourth estate is essential to the proper functioning of the constitutional democractic republic.
This category is actually the number one cause of death for ages 1-44. The numbers are fairly constant from ages 15 to 64 but the rate jumps up by a factor of 2.5 after age 65. Assuming that retirees are not just taking up sky diving, this is probably due to increased frailty and hospitalizations caused by falls.
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
EDIT: It seems that in addition to car accidents, poisoning, overdoses, and falls, make up the vast majority of this category.
I'm guessing it's because your heart is on the left (unless you have situs inversus), so he's arguing movies treat a chest wound on the left as hitting the heart
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
EDIT: Take the data from the above table multiply the deaths by the number of "years of life lost" (65 minus the mid-range age for each column) and ignoring the 65 and older age group and I think you might see a better correlation with news coverage.
A reasonable expectation for news coverage would be that coverage is proportional to deaths weighted by years of HealthSpan lost.
That cannot be exactly right. But coverage of loss of GrimSpan is a separate issue. If hip replacements and cataract operations are reducing the GrimSpan by increasing the HealthSpan that is a happier story than better infection control at Alzheimer's units increasing the GrimSpan. It is hard to state an expectation about news coverage of loss of GrimSpan
How many people do you know that were killed or injured in a terrorist attack? Second order? Same question for {murdered, illness, natural cause}. Compare magnitudes.
What leads you to believe that was ever a major cause of death for more than a tiny handful of people? It would seem the hardships of living before modern medicine and (any) agriculture would have killed far more people. Given how expensive/risky it was to collect food, why would any group of folks risk most of their healthy, strong brood to wage regional conflict? If they lost, all of them would lose by virtue of losing the most capable members of the society.
recently however, i have come to worry that this position lacks empathy. especially in light of recent mass shootings in the US, i am forced to consider that some types of deaths have far worse second order effects than others. if ten people die on different days out in the woods, ten sets of family and friends are devastated. tragic, but if ten students are killed at school in the same day, it seems that the lasting damage is far more severe and widespread.
to some extent you can say that's just because people are emotional/irrational and they are blocking optimal allocation, but maybe the optimal solution does need to take into account how people feel about things. maybe things like terrorism and mass shootings are actually a lot more harmful than the numbers suggest.
I think it's clear it's not due to its infrequency that it's reported on so much.
911 was probably too few deaths to make an impact in the statistics though. You'd need something killing tens of millions of people
This brings me to the question: What are the data on deaths in certain age brackets? If, say, media coverage was proportional to the number of people under 18 or under 25 who died, or perhaps some sum of "f(age(person))" where e.g. f(under 18) = 1, f(18-25) = 0.9, f(65+) = 0.01... then that would be a very striking result. (I guess if the smallest weight is 0.01, then no disparities exceeding 100x, such as the terrorism ~4000x disparity, can be explained.)
Edit: Well, here we go. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
Unintentional Injury is cause #1 for ages 1-44. Suicide is #2 for 15-34, #3 for 10-14, and less for higher ages. Homicide is #3 for 15-34 and 1-4 (!), and #4 for 5-14. Cancer is #2 for 5-14 and 35-44, #4 for 1-4 and 15-34. Congenital Anomalies is #1 for <1, #2 for 1-4, and #3 for 5-9. Terrorism isn't listed, although if it were counted it might go under homicide. Heart Disease is #5 or less for 0-34, and #3 or higher starting at 35+.
If you figure that the news media only cares about young people, it goes some distance towards explaining matters...
In other words, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
And to go along with that, I believe it is trying to ask the question "is it not just as important to follow the trends in so-called 'death by natural causes' as it is to follow trends for 'unnatural causes', at least as far as public awareness/good is concerned?"
Although the study is trying to do a larger scale comparison between the perceived and actul leading causes of deaths, it would serve it much better if it were to segment the results by age group.
How many people are aware of these data? I think that ignorance is going to be primarily the media's fault.
[1] - https://news.vice.com/article/glock-pistol-omar-mateen-orlan...
The "war on terror" is costly and only creates more terrorism... stoking public fear feeds back into the problem. Legislation could significantly reduce firearm abuse with negligible cost and no feedback loops.
The main prevention measure for both murder and suicide is to reduce access to methods.
It's fine for a nation to say they make the choice not to restrict access to guns, but they need to be honest about the increased numbers of people dying this will cause.
A sibling questioned the validity of this for suicide, and I agree. Anyone sufficiently motivated to kill themselves will find a way. Knife, rope, drug overdose, threaten a police officer, vehicular "accident", skydiving, move-to-Oregon (for legally assisted suicide, that is -- OR's a nice place :)), sit in the garage while the car is running... every single one of these things is something that a suicidal person could come up with quite easily, and do, even if they don't have a firearm.
The only thing reducing access to firearms will do is change the method of suicide. Humans have been finding ways to do it for thousands of years.
These add little to no value because in most of the cases where such a line of argument is put forward, there is a sizable set that do not satisfy the "for a sufficiently [blah]" condition. Not only are these sets sizeable, sometimes they are the particularly relevant set.
Many suicidal people have been talked out of it. So its not hard to believe that lack of access to quick measures would have influence.
Digression: I blame movies for popularizing shooting at one's temple. That's how many end up with a botched attempt. If one must, one should take out the brain stem as quickly as possible.
This is untrue, and it's dangerously untrue.
> The only thing reducing access to firearms will do is change the method of suicide.
Method substitution tends not to happen, or it takes some years to happen.
We know this from some natural experiments. For example, car exhaust fumes used to be a common method, and then we got cleaner engines and catalytic converters and again we saw a long lasting drop in deaths by suicide.
And even if every person did substitute a different method it's likely they'd be using a more survivable method.
Also, you don't often see a knife, rope, car, drug overdose, skydiving, or assisted suicide used in a murder-suicide scenario. (Murder-suicide by car certainly happens, but not as often as with a gun.)
For example, in the UK this has meant phasing out some ineffective and dangerous medication; reducing the pack sizes of others; and encouraging doctors to safer prescribing of opioids.
I always feel like a drug runner coming back to the US with bottles of generic tylenol and advil.