From Our World in Data
More than 80% of people — including surveyed Americans, Brits, Germans, and Italians — say they follow the news because they “want to know what is going on in the world around them.”1 It’s not just that people expect the news to inform them about what’s going on in the world. Most think that it does. When asked what emotions the news generates, “informed” was the most common response.2
This is what media outlets themselves promise to do. Here are several quotes from the New York Times’s mission statement:
“We seek the truth and help people understand the world. [...]
We help a global audience understand a vast and diverse world.”
However, as we’ll see in this article, the media focuses on a particular sliver of our world, leaving much of the “vast and diverse world” largely out of their reporting. We’ll investigate this through the lens of health, looking at causes of death and reporting in the United States.
As we’ll discuss, our point is not that we should want or expect the media’s coverage to perfectly match the real distribution of deaths, although we’d argue that it would be better if it were less skewed. We wrote this article so that you, the reader, are aware of a significant disconnect between what we often hear and what actually happens.
It’s easy to conflate what we see in the news with the reality of our world, and keeping this mismatch in mind can help you avoid falling into this trap.
We focused on causes of death and media coverage in the United States in 2023.
The full list of all causes of death is very long, and since many causes are very rare, we didn’t investigate all of them. But our analysis accounts for 76% of all deaths in the US in 2023.3 It includes the 12 leading causes of death in the US, plus homicide, drug overdoses, and terrorism, since they receive a lot of attention in the media.
We used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to calculate each cause’s share of the total.4 We then compared this to the relative share of articles that mentioned these causes of death in three media outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News. We selected these three because they are among the biggest national news organizations, are extremely popular, and are seen as being on different parts of the political spectrum.
To count the number of mentions, we relied on Media Cloud, an open-source platform regularly used for media analysis. In an extended methodology document, we provide many more details on how we constructed the data. Two things are important to mention here.
- For each cause of death, we included synonyms in our search. So, when searching for mentions of “homicide”, we also included mentions of related terms such as “murder”, “killer”, and other terms. For “heart disease”, we included terms like “heart attack”, “cardiac arrest”, “heart failure”, and many others.
- We only counted articles where a cause of death — or its related terms — was mentioned more than once. This ensures that our analysis is focused on reporting on causes of death rather than just articles that mention a cause of death in passing. Additionally, this approach reduces the number of false positives and noise in our results.
You can see the results of our analysis in the chart below.
There are two big takeaways from this analysis. The first one is that the actual distribution of deaths shown on the left is very different from the causes of death that the media talks about.
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.
The insight in this comparison, then, is not about differences between partisan media. It’s about the difference between actual causes of death and what the news tells Americans about. Those differences — as we can see in the chart — are huge.
Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage. Other chronic issues, such as strokes, respiratory problems, diabetes, and kidney and liver disease, were also very underrepresented in the news.
Rare — but dramatic — events such as homicides and terrorism received more than half of all media coverage, despite being much smaller causes of death in the US. Terrorism, in particular, is a very rare cause of death, with 16 deaths in 2023.5
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| click on the graphic to enlarge |
Of course, news media are all about news --- and engagement. We're not interested in routine stuff. But an earthquake is news. A murder in your town is news. And so on. But we would do well to remember that the obsessions of the media do not really show what matters,
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