People follow the news, including health news, to learn of new advances and to plan reasonable health strategies. Understanding the causes of death of major concern is one topic of interest to many people.
While the causes of death in the USA and other countries is well known, with heart disease and cancer causing over 50% of those deaths, does the media represent that fact by dedicating over 50% of their coverage to those two health issues?
A new analysis indicates that the news media offers a very inaccurate view of death in the USA.
The causes of death included account for 76% of all deaths in the US in 2023.It includes the 12 leading causes of death in the US, plus homicide, drug overdoses, and terrorism, since they receive a lot of attention in the media.
The analysts used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to calculate each cause’s share of the total. This was compared this to the relative share of articles that mentioned these causes of death in three media outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News.
To count the number of mentions, we relied on Media Cloud, an open-source platform regularly used for media analysis.
The actual distribution of deaths is very different from the causes of death that the media talks about.
The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.
Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage. Other chronic issues, such as strokes, respiratory problems, diabetes, and kidney and liver disease, were also very underrepresented in the news.
Rare — but dramatic — events such as homicides and terrorism received more than half of all media coverage, despite being much smaller causes of death in the US. Terrorism, in particular, is a very rare cause of death, with 16 deaths in 2023.
It highlights that homicides and terrorism are extremely overrepresented. Homicides received 43 times more coverage than their share of deaths; terrorism received over 18,000 times more.
At the other end, conditions like heart disease and cancer are very underreported. Overall, the media offer a distorted and inaccurate analysis of causes of death in the USA.
