Charting Death
▻https://owenshen24.github.io/charting-death
Well, it turns out there’s a fascinating study conducted by Paul Slovic and Barbara Combs where they looked at how often different types of deaths were mentioned in the news. They then compared the frequency of news coverage with the actual frequency of people who died for each cause.
The results are what one might cynically expect:
“Although all diseases claim almost 1,OOO times as many lives as do homicides, there were about three times as many articles about homicides than about all diseases. Furthermore, homicide articles tended to be more than twice as long as articles reporting deaths from diseases and accidents.”
Since 1979, when the original Combs and Slovic study was conducted, there have been several more empirical analyses which have found largely similar results. (Notably, here and here)