This is a literal visual representation of how the media manufactures the population’s consent for a substandard health system in America. If for example they had reported on all the people dying of kidney failure or heart disease each night instead of filling the airwaves with never-ending terrorism stories, then we might actually have had universal healthcare by now.
by Proof-Delay-602
25 Comments
If this isn’t OC I think this sub asks you to provide the direct link instead.
It needs a source and tool in the top-level comment if OC.
There’s no money to be made on things like reporting cancer. But tons to be made on reporting terrorism .
The news is a product that is trying to make money (advertising), after all.
Anybody who thinks the news reports on things because they want people to be well informed is delusional.
Yes, the news media, by definition, tends to focus on things that are new or unusual, not on things that are common. You won’t see headlines like “Farmer Plants Crops” any more than you would see headlines like “Old Man Dies of Cardiac Arrest”.
I don’t think your conclusion of why they avoid reporting illness deaths is correct
I live in a country with free healthcare and here no journalist reports those deaths either, except for the most excepcional cases
It’s not like people need to watch TV to understand how many people die daily in hospital due to cancer or heart disease, because it’s so common the odds are, depending of your age group, every year a relative, friend or friends relative will die for similar reason
USA: slowly killing myself is freedom. .
Could we adjust to compensate for ‘years of life lost’?
For example if US life expectancy is about 78, and the average age (hypothetically) of someone who dies of heart disease is 73 (5 years premature) whereas the average age of someone who dies by homicide is 38 (40 years premature) then maybe media attention should be 8 times higher per homicide death than per heart disease death.
You also should compare these to other developed countries e.g. the UK if you’re interested in focussing attention on healthcare systems.
the media reports on things that are interesting and doesn’t report on things that are boring.
it’s bad, and we need better awareness of real cause of death statistics,
but it isn’t some kind of conspiracy to manufacture consent or anything lol.
you’ll get the exact same findings anywhere in the world, even if they have a generous, popular, nationalised health systems that the media supports.
Ummmm do you think it could be because the media is supposed to report on rare and unusual events? Especially in the case of a person losing their life because of another person. That’s far more newsworthy than someone dying of a heart attack. And pretty much every news website has an entire section dedicated to health issues. They are covering everything on the left graph, but it’s more focused on health research and not who is actually dying. But even with those research articles they usually say how many people die every year from various diseases.
Terrorists don’t buy media ad space
This reminds me of 2020-2021 when EVERYONE died of COVID
Just what I want when a family member dies of cancer – for them to be featured on Fox News.
I dont think a more accurate proportion of representation is necessarily the answer. I do like how some of those are larger because they are avoidable deaths. I think its right and correct to overrepresent homicide and suicide, for example, for awareness.
But I agree some of the agendas are less savoury.
“In today’s news 4,527 Americans died of heart disease. Thank you for tuning in.”
News media reports on abnormal events. People dying of heart attacks is to be expected.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/k2niN4P4uj
This was posted here yesterday by the creator.
makes sense that rare occursions are being reported more often. Ironically….
This feels like the most “obvious thing that happens is obvious” chart I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how you reached that conclusion lol
What if you change it to life years lost? I think that is the elephant in the room.
Your conclusion seems forced.
People dying of chronic disease isn’t news or interesting so doesn’t get eyeballs.
Friend, every other news organisation in other countries would have the same sort of reporting standards. Homicide would make the news, someone dying by cancer would not unless they are a celeb or a high-profile figure. And most other countries have some kind of socialized or better healthcare programmes.
You’d hope your government doesn’t govern by what news outlets cover and instead look at numbers and implement policies based on facts and figures. I’m sorry that the US doesn’t seem like its capable of doing that, but having the daily news read out the names of everyone who died due to cancer or a heart attack for that day…
…might actually be an interesting piece of programming, but then you’d probably run into various sorts of privacy concerns.
Politically-charged hype cyclers. Once it’s “ohhh noses ze terororrystus” next day drugs epidemic and after 1 week, diversion with social inequality and industry-specific job ineptitude.
Without getting too conspiratorial, free speech exists in a bubble of bull, with equally good stinking smell.
I have two points to make about this:
Firstly, the papers report on murders and terrorism more because they tend to have actual stories attached to them. There is so much to write about with murders, just take the Charlie Kirk assassination as an example. But what’s there to say about Jane Doe, 80, who died of kidney failure and is survived by… You can’t write a whole article when there’s only one or two lines of content. But what you can do is turn that one line into a statistic, and then make those statistic freely available to anyone who cares to look at them – like yourself.
Secondly, the news DOES report on these deaths! They’re called obituaries almost every local paper has them.
We don’t have news media anymore – it’s all and I mean all about eyeballs for advertising revenue and influence. End of story
“Shocking news today coming out of Michigan, another mass cardiac event has taken the lives of several people all in their individual homes at various times throughout the day”
The average age of someone dying from cancer is 73. The average age of a homicide victim is late 30’s. I would say there is a big difference…
The media reports on things people want to read.