Its really bothering me that 2.1% was listed above 2.2% at the suicide covid bars.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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The 2.1 was 2.19 truncated.
The 2.2 was 2.18 rounded.
Actually?
I have no idea, unfortunately
Heart disease, cancer, etc are part of the plan. Both boring and too close to home. Terrorism and homicide are suitably scary, morally charged, and far enough removed from most people's lives to be mostly abstract fears.
Heart disease, cancer, etc are part of the plan.
exactly. they can't exactly have you all worried about the byproducts of their industries. Worry about that guy who's different, don't care about the planet we're burning
Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is news.
In other news: The obese Tom from next door got a heart attack and died. The 84-year-old grandma from across the street is still in hospital, and the cancer is getting worse. Stay tuned to find out if she is still alive tomorrow.
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"Joe Boomer, 85, chronic smoker and alcoholic, dies of heart attack, none of his family were surprised." is not exactly an intresting article to read lol.
Exactly. People want drama so crimes are more often reported by the media.
Live 85 years as a smoker and alcoholic - I will take it as a win.
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Sorry in advance for the political topic, but it's directly related to the info in the OP.
Is the bar for causes of death roughly similar across social classes? As in: are rich/poor people more/less likely to die from certain causes than others? I'm asking because I'm wondering if news coverage isn't a bit closer to "reasons why rich people die" than to "reasons why your typical person dies" there (in USA). Just a hypothesis, mind you.
Not an american but i would think that not many rich people actually get murdered, unfortunately. Private security and someone wealthy is generally more valuable alive than dead if you are looking for ransom or such.
That reminds me, there's this anti-capitalist, anti-war children's film by Satyajit Ray called Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. In it, there's a song that says that the king is sad and afraid since he has so much money. He tries to cope by punishing others, but it never makes him happy. The only solution offered was to let go of all his riches, and that finally made him happy.
It was for children, so I understand why sadness was used instead of fear. But they do need to be afraid.
As an aside, I think that movie had a decent impact in the communist revolution that happened in my state in the 70-80s. Ray has made some of the greatest movies in the history of cinema, but his children's films still hold a dear place in the hearts of many generations of Bengalis.
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Those would be very interesting graphs to see. There is definitely a massive difference between the graph for rich and poor. One window into that is the difference in longevity between the rich and poor. The rich have a ~90 year lifespan.
Considering that the top reasons for death in the US are related to, more or less, how well you treat your body - as in exercise, diet - there will absolutely be data on poorer people being affected more. If you don't have enough money for a good diet or sports, naturally your body's health will suffer as a result.
Alzheimer and cancer, depending on the cancer, maybe not so much.
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Fear mongering and sensatislism vs educational and beneficial programming.
How we are taught to stop terrorism and homicides, give more power to police and authority figures.
How one actually stops terrorism and homicides, better educate people and provide them with higher quality social and health services. Which ironically result in more preventative care and less deaths from the treatable diseases that are underreported.
Eat this, not that.
Another way to look at something is newsworthiness. If it's something that's super common, it isn't remarkable enough to make the news.
I don't want to live in a world where terrorism is so common it isn't even worth talking about on the news.
Yeah 5 dead from a shooting at an American school is local news. At an Australian school it's international news.
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I wonder how the comparison would look if you compared years lost per type of death?
That is, old people die of heart disease and cancer. Young people die of accidents and violence.
I'm assuming that 40 of the 42% of homicide coverage was that one CEO.
It's not a homicide if they aren't human
Now now, they are human, just not humane.
They are also psychopaths.
Source?
A disproportionate amount, anyway. And then there's homicides that only get covered locally as well, because it's just some poor person.
On the left: shit happens
On the right: humans are doing stupid shit
I think the OP is trying to express that the New York times is distorting the news. Perhaps true, but humans doing stupid shit will always sell a newspaper.
Yeah, I also don't think writing an article every time someone dies from cancer or a heart attack would benefit anyone.
I feel like hearing more kids dying with ass cancer stories and heart disease deaths and people dying from preventable diseases stories would probably shift people away from focusing just on guns and homicide and maybe actually cause people to care about science and solving those other things.
Not that those are good to not focus on, just that there's already an ongoing anti vs pro gun conversation going and at least if we talk about something else that's proportional causing deaths... well, I doubt there are many "pro-cancer" people out there (but I know it's non-zero).
I guess I just want some positive momentum on something at this point.
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It doesn't have to be an accusation of distortion. Can also just be a reminder that every day reality is not what we read in the paper or see in movies.
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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.
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Isn't this normal for news? The whole dog bites man, man bites dog thing?
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It used to be terrorism all the time, have they replaced that with simple homicide now? Definently needs a new war then!
Going to Iran to defend America from terrorism again this weekend according to rumours.
Why is no one dying of old age?
Because being old doesn't kill you. It's the things associated with old age that kill you.
My wife, after I inform her Elizabeth II died :
"What did she die of?"
Me, straight faced :
"of being ~~98~~ 96 fuckin' years old"
It’d be neat to see some other news outlets as well. I’m sure there’s a massive difference.
I doubt it.
NGL.. let's be real here.
Your average New York Joe Blowhole who's 67, obese, diabetic and smoked since he was 15 isn't going to be as newsworthy a story as a murder is, the day he drops dead of a heart attack in his living room.
Outside of the obit a family member puts in the paper, why would the newspapers report on such an everyday death?
Natural causes of death, are ho-hum.
The newspapers report on the things that aren't the run-of-the-mill, occurrences.
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Fucking great visual.
Would be interesting to see it in a stacked bar graph with actual va. represented side by side to give scale to the disproportionism.
Why is COVID (2.2%) below Suicide (2.1%) on the graph on the left? Everything else is in decending order of occurance
On the one hand, I get this, what's unexpected is more interesting and newsworthy, but at the same time I do see how it creates problems. Airplane travel is much safer than cars, but people feel unsafe in planes. Part of it is because you aren't personally in control, sure, but a lot of it is definitely the availability hueristic*. Especially following things like the September 11th attacks and Malaysian Airlines planes going missing.
But a major issue with it is that it leads to us viewing things like car accidents (and heart disease and cancer) as inevitable and a mere fact of life we can't do anything about. Meanwhile whenever there is an airplane crash it's very thoroughly investigated and will likely lead to changes in regulations.
*: I may be getting the name wrong.
politics equals more views on MSM, and newspapers. homicides/terrorism is part of that, so is drugs. just like how they dont really report on climate change, or disease.
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I have a really hard time with drug overdose being it's own thing. That sounds a lot like ignoring the large number of intentional overdoses that happen.
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