What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?

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.

Counting deaths and mentions in popular media

What do Americans die from, and what do they read about in the news?

How over- and underrepresented are different causes of death in the media?

Why is the media so biased towards dramatic risks?

Does this bias really matter?

...read more at ourworldindata.org