Does the news reflect what we die from?

 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

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,

The New York Times newsroom in January 2025

 Tom The Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling

Apocalypse becomes the new normal

From Paul Krugman of the New York Times:

The past week’s images from Australia have been nightmarish: walls of flame, blood-red skies, residents huddled on beaches as they try to escape the inferno. The bush fires have been so intense that they have generated “fire tornadoes” powerful enough to flip over heavy trucks.

The thing is, Australia’s summer of fire is only the latest in a string of catastrophic weather events over the past year: unprecedented flooding in the Midwest, a heat wave in India that sent temperatures to 123 degrees, another heat wave that brought unheard-of temperatures to much of Europe.

And all of these catastrophes were related to climate change.

Notice that I said “related to” rather than “caused by” climate change. This is a distinction that has flummoxed many people over the years. Any individual weather event has multiple causes, which was one reason news reports used to avoid mentioning the possible role of climate change in natural disasters.

In recent years, however, climate scientists have tried to cut through this confusion by engaging in “extreme event attribution,” which focuses on probabilities: You can’t necessarily say that climate change caused a particular heat wave, but you can ask how much difference global warming made to the probability of that heat wave happening. And the answer, typically, is a lot: Climate change makes the kinds of extreme weather events we’ve been seeing much more likely.

And while there’s a lot of randomness in weather outcomes, that randomness actually makes climate change much more damaging in its early stages than most people realize. On our current trajectory, Florida as a whole will eventually be swallowed by the sea, but long before that happens, rising sea levels will make catastrophic storm surges commonplace. Much of India will eventually become uninhabitable, but killing heat waves and droughts will take a deadly toll well before that point is reached.

Put it this way: While it will take generations for the full consequences of climate change to play out, there will be many localized, temporary disasters along the way. Apocalypse will become the new normal — and that’s happening right in front of our eyes.

Attack of the Wall Street Snowflakes

NY Stock Exchange by Jeenah Moon for the New York Times

From Paul Krugman at The New York Times

Given all the recent focus on health policy, you might think that the medical-industrial complex would be heavily involved in the Democratic primary race, going all-out to block Elizabeth Warren. And a coalition of drug companies, insurers and hospitals is indeed running ads attacking “Medicare for all.”

But the health industry’s political role has been relatively muted so far. Partly this may reflect realism: Even if Warren becomes president, the chances of getting Medicare for all through Congress are small. It may also reflect the surprising openness of doctors to reform. While the American Medical Association still officially opposes single-payer, at a recent meeting, 47 percent of the delegates voted to drop that opposition.

No, the really intense backlash against Warren and progressive Democrats in general is coming from Wall Street. And while that opposition partly reflects self-interest, Wall Street’s Warren hatred has a level of virulence, sometimes crossing into hysteria, that goes beyond normal political calculation.

What’s behind that virulence?

First, let’s talk about the rational reasons Wall Street is worried about Warren. She is, of course, calling for major tax increases on the very wealthy, those with wealth exceeding $50 million, and the financial industry is strongly represented in that elite club. And since raising taxes on the wealthy is highly popular, it’s an idea a progressive president might actually be able to turn into real policy.

Warren is also a big believer in stricter financial regulation; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was highly effective until the Trump administration set about gutting it, was her brainchild.

So if you are a Wall Street billionaire, rational self-interest might well induce you to oppose Warren. Rationality does not, however, explain why a money manager like Leon Cooperman — who just two years ago settled a suit over insider trading for $5 million, although without admitting wrongdoing — would circulate an embarrassing, self-pitying open letter denouncing Warren for her failure to appreciate all the wonderful things billionaires like him do for society.

Nor does it explain why Cliff Asness, another money manager, would fly into a rage at Warren adviser Gabriel Zucman for using the term “revenue maximizing” — a standard piece of economic jargon — describing it as “disgustingly immoral.”

In any case, the point is that Wall Street billionaires, even more than billionaires in general, seem to be snowflakes, emotionally unable to handle criticism.

I’m not sure why that should be the case, but it may be that in their hearts they suspect that the critics have a point.

What, after all, does modern finance actually do for the economy? Unlike the robber barons of yore, today’s Wall Street tycoons don’t build anything tangible. They don’t even direct money to the people who actually are building the industries of the future. The vast expansion of credit in America after around 1980 basically involved a surge in consumer debt rather than new money for business investment.  [Contrast that with what Elon Musk is doing]

Moreover, there is growing evidence that when the financial sector gets too big it actually acts as a drag on the economy — and America is well past that point.

Now, human nature being what it is, people who secretly wonder whether they really deserve their wealth get especially angry when others express these doubts publicly. So it’s not surprising that people who couldn’t handle Obama’s mild, polite criticism are completely losing it over Warren.

[Read more here]

Now we suffer the consequences

From The New York Times via ClimateCrocks

In Northern California, power was cut to more than a million people this week. Near Houston, houses that flooded only two years ago just succumbed again. The South endured record-shattering fall heat waves. In Miami, salt water bubbled through street drains yet again as the rising ocean mounted a fresh assault.

All of it was predicted, in general outline, decades ago. We did not listen. Ideologues and paid shills cajoled us to ignore the warnings. Politicians cashed their checks from the fossil fuel lobbyists and slithered away.

Today, we act surprised as the climate emergency descends upon us in all its ferocity.

The scientists knew long ago, and told us, that the sea would invade the coasts. They knew a hotter atmosphere would send heavier rains to inundate our cities and farms. They knew the landscape of California, which always becomes desiccated in the late summer and early fall, would dry out more in a hotter climate.

But even the scientists did not quite foresee the way that bone-dry vegetation would turn into a firebomb waiting for a spark. California is the state that has done the most to battle the climate crisis, but that has not saved it from recent fires so ferocious they burned people alive.

In high winds, ill-maintained power lines strung across aging poles are often the source of the spark. The largest utility in the state, Pacific Gas & Electric, has already been propelled into bankruptcy by fire liabilities it calculates at $30 billion. Now PG&E, far behind in basic tasks meant to make its system safer, is pre-emptively shutting down power lines on windy days to try to prevent more death and destruction.

If there is any fix for the fire situation, it will not be cheap or easy. True, the people who were running the power company deserve some blame — but not all of it. We now know that power rates in California, high as they may have seemed, were a false economy. The public was not paying enough to harden the electric grid against rising climate risks.

Nationwide, you can say the same about the fossil fuels we burned so heedlessly these last decades. They seemed cheap and convenient at the time. Only now are we learning the true cost.

As tempting as it is to blame the politicians and the fossil fuel executives for the fix we find ourselves in, that is too easy. At any time in these last three decades, we could have woken up. We could have heeded the warnings of scientists like James E. Hansen of NASA, who told Congress in 1988 that the planet was warming sharply and would continue to do so if we persisted in burning fossil fuels. We could have voted James Inhofe, the climate-denying senator from Oklahoma, out of office. Had we been aroused and angry, we could have wielded our democratic power to bring the fossil fuel companies to heel.

I remember sitting with Dr. Hansen in his NASA office the week he retired, in 2013, wondering along with him when the public revolt over the climate crisis would finally begin.

Now we have our answer. Under the unlikely leadership of a brave 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, we are marching in the streets now by the millions. We are making demands. We are angry, and should be, but let’s spare a moment to be angry at ourselves for waiting so long.

People keep asking: Is it too late?

Yes, in some sense it is. What the events in California and Miami and Houston tell us is that we are living through the risks of an altered climate now, not a hundred years from now. Expect the situation to keep getting worse for the rest of your life. The ocean will keep rising for centuries, probably much faster than today. We will lose our great coastal cities.

But here is the thing people must understand: The crisis is still manageable, barely. If we do not move far more aggressively, it could spiral entirely out of control. At a global scale, we have yet to turn the corner and start cutting emissions. If we let them keep rising, today’s wildfires and floods will seem like child’s play soon enough. In a world of ever-rising temperatures, mass starvation is but one of the risks.

The most urgent imperative now is to turn our fear and frustration into votes.

The climate troglodytes must be thrown out of office, starting with Donald J. Trump. We need laws with teeth to propel the clean energy transition: hard targets, bans, taxes, mandates. We cannot stand back for another presidential election in which the Republican Party lies about this issue while the Democratic Party hides from it.

Granted, “Curtail future damage!” is not an inspiring battle cry. “To the Bastille!” it is not. Yet millions of young people have begun to understand the stakes, their fears given voice by that young lady from Sweden, with her moral intelligence and her capacity to wield the truth like a rapier.

Look again at that picture of her, a lone student picketing Sweden’s Parliament with a homemade sign, and let yourself marvel at the birth of a global movement. Older people forced the youth into this situation by our dereliction, and now we must not let them carry the battle alone.

Greta Thunberg outside Swedish Parliament

The Trumpification of the Fed

Janet Yellen, former Fed Chair, who is "too short" according to Trump
Source: CNBC

From Paul Krugman at the New York Times:

In late 2015 then-candidate Donald Trump accused Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve, of being part of a political conspiracy. Yellen, he insisted, was keeping interest rates unjustifiably low in an attempt to help Hillary Clinton win the presidency.

As it happens, there were very good reasons for the Fed to keep rates low at the time. Some measures of the job market, notably prime-age employment, were still well below precrisis levels, and business investment was going through a significant slump — a sort of mini-recession.

Fast forward to the present. The employment picture is much stronger now than it was then. There are hints of an economic slowdown, partly because of the uncertainty created by Trump’s trade war, but they’re considerably fainter than those of 2015-16. And Trump himself keeps boasting about the economy’s strength.

Yet he is openly pressuring the Fed to cut rates, and is reportedly looking for ways to demote Jay Powell, the man he himself chose to replace Yellen — declining to reappoint Yellen, according to some reports, because he didn’t think she was tall enough.

But wait, there’s more. While there are, as I said, hints of a slowdown here, there are much stronger warning signs in Europe, where manufacturing is slumping and recession worries are on the rise. Yet even as he tries to bully the Fed into cutting rates, Trump flew into a rage over reports that the European Central Bank, Europe’s counterpart to the Fed, is considering rate cuts of its own, which would weaken the euro and make U.S. industry less competitive.

If these various positions sound inconsistent to you, you’re just not thinking about them in the right way. The common principle is simple: Monetary policy should be whatever serves Donald Trump’s interests. Nothing else matters.

And Trump’s current rage at the Fed should be understood mainly as an expression of frustration over the failure of his 2017 tax cut.

Yes, the tax cut gave the economy a boost, as you’d expect from policies that widened the annual full-employment budget deficit by about $400 billion. (Imagine what the Obama economy would have looked like if Congress had let him spend $400 billion a year on, say, infrastructure.) But it was a pretty modest boost, considering, with much of the tax cut being used just to buy back corporate stock.

More to the point, the tax cut was a political bust: Trump isn’t getting much credit for good economic numbers, and a plurality of the white working-class voters on whom the tweeter in chief depends believe (correctly) that his policies mainly benefit people richer than themselves.

So Trump is, in effect, demanding that the Fed bail him out of the consequences of his own policy failures. And if that were the whole story, the appropriate response would be some polite, Fedspeak version of “Go to hell.”

But as it happens, Trump and his tantrums aren’t the whole story. There is, in fact, a strong case that the Fed was too quick to raise interest rates from 2015 to 2019 — that it underestimated how much slack there still was in the U.S. economy and overestimated the economy’s underlying strength (which it has done consistently over the past decade).

And there is correspondingly a case for partially reversing recent Fed rate hikes, and cutting rates now as insurance against a possible future slump — getting ahead of the curve. Donald Trump is the worst possible person to be making this argument, but that doesn’t mean that the argument is wrong.

So what should the Fed do?

Central bankers, like those running the Fed, try to portray themselves as apolitical and technocratic. This is never quite true in practice, but it’s an ideal toward which they strive. Thanks to Trump, however, whatever the Fed does next will be seen as deeply political. If it does cut rates despite low unemployment, this will be seen as giving up its independence and letting Trump dictate policy. If it doesn’t, Trump will lash out even harder.

And if I were Powell, I’d be worried about an even worse scenario. Suppose the Fed were to cut rates, and growth and inflation end up being higher than expected. Conventional policy would then call for reversing the rate cut — right on the eve of the 2020 election. The political firestorm would be horrific.

[Read more here]

The  Fed is on a hiding to nothing.  If it cuts rates too late, it risks Trump's ire, rightly.  But if it cuts too soon,  then it looks as if it is giving in to Trump.  The markets won't like that.  They like an independent central bank, even when it works against their short term positions, because they know that greater certainty means smaller risk premia, and thus better conditions (for example, lower inflation) in the long term.  And if, as Krugman posits, the Fed cuts rates now but has to raise them later, for example, just before the election, the Fed will be under huge pressure.

My own belief is that the Fed will delay cutting rates now, just to ensure that there is incontrovertible evidence that the US economy has slowed.  And in private, they will say to the ECB (European Central Bank) and the BOJ (Bank of Japan), the central banks of Europe and Japan respectively, that they're on their own.  Uncertainty is a big killer of economic growth.  People postpone marginal expenditure, firms postpone hiring and fixed investment, and look to cut costs and improve cash flow so that their prospects for survival improve.  We are seeing all these effects in the data, in the US and Europe and Japan and China.  The combination of a hobbled Fed and trade wars is having a negative effect on world growth.  And it's only going to get worse.