Reality versus The Media

An interesting chart to be sure.

I seem to bang on quite a lot about the media being the major weak link in our (meaning the West, not America because I'm not American) socio-political system. While the media does provide some direct, unfiltered reporting of what politicians say and do, much of it also cloaks events in the veils of opinion. Any event can be twisted towards any interpretation possible. Any mistake can be seen as brazen evil. Any statement of bigotry can be seen as just and fair. Were I to have a magic wand to reform society, my first target would be without hesitation the media, not the politicians.

And yet it would be foolish to believe the media do things simply because they are bad people. That would be as pointless as the age-old complaints about the moral decline of society and how people are all just worse nowadays somehow, usually made without any justification or reasoning. While it's clear that the media get things all out of proportion, at the same time I can't help but feel that some of this is entirely natural. Not everything happens because of the network structure of society. 

In this case, dying from natural causes is certainly a hell of a lot less threatening and interesting than dying due to unnatural ones. Yes, we can all make better choices and increase our chances of living healthier for longer, but ultimately, we all gotta go sometime. And yes, stories of murder and violence sell more newspapers than telling people that an old grandma passed away peacefully in her sleep one summer's eve. But it's undeniable, I think, that stories of murder and violence do hold an innately greater fascination than those of natural causes : we don't focus on them because the news reporters are bad people, or even because they lack training in statistics to see the bigger picture, but mainly just because that's innate human nature. Any unusual event is going to attract more attention than a normal occurrence - if it wasn't in some way unusual, it wouldn't be news. The sheer abnormality of terrorism and murder means it's bound to get more attention than people dying of old age.

Of course how we deal with threats is intimately connected with how we report them, but while we shouldn't let the media off the hook for massively exaggerating the threats from terrorism and murder, neither should we ascribe them the full blame for this. Readers are interested in such events; journalists are interested in writing about them - and the papers are necessarily interested in selling papers. Magic wands aside, this isn't an easy wheel to break.

EDIT : To be clear, I mean to say not only that the skewed reporting is due to human nature, but even that there's a certain logic to it; the exaggeration of some risks isn't just because we're bad at evaluating threats (note the emphasis though). If you’re old or seriously ill, chances are you already know about it. You already have the information you need to act on and have probably already accounted for the risk factor - or equally, if you know you’re not old or seriously ill, you know you don’t need to worry about those. There’s no point in reporting them because they develop in a generally known way : continuously reporting the risk of developing cancer would just be repetitive and largely to no purpose.

In contrast, violent crimes threaten more or less everyone in an unpredictable way. In some sense, it presents an extra risk on top of the background level of risk that’s already accounted for - if a murderer is on the loose, it's much more important to be told about that immediately than it is to be informed of the health risks associated with drinking a Coke. Which is not to say that disproportionately reporting it doesn’t cause enormous problems, only that it’s not wholly without logic as well as being driven by more emotional causes.

Contrast this with my earlier stance where I compared how much more likely you are to die from drowning than terrorism. Perhaps it's not as easy as I thought to even state what a sensible risk perception is. Everyone already knows that deep water is dangerous, but people in the desert seldom stop to worry about it. Risk must be evaluated locally (both due to location and current circumstances), and reporting that accounts for that is extremely difficult. While I still broadly agree with Stephen Pinker's stance that we should see terrorism as just another hazard and not treat it as anything special* - you are after all just as dead from a heart attack as a bomb - to properly state the risk of death from different causes is highly misleading if we present only the global averages.

* Especially since terrorism only works because it causes fear and gains attention.

And finally, note how different the searches are from the media reports. Although we have to be extremely wary of interpreting what "searches" actually imply here, it would seem that the news media's influence is far from total.