this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
738 points (99.2% liked)
Data is Beautiful
3634 readers
1 users here now
Be respectful
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
I don't understand how anyone is surprised by this. "Man has heart attack" is hardly interesting or news. "Gorilla escapes zoo and kills child" is obviously newsworthy. It has nothing to do with the frequency of an event. In fact, it's probably inversely proportional because people don't need to be told what they already know.