Comment by nemild | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemild | Hacker News Reader

Hans Rosling's work is famous for pointing out how media incentives, statistical illiteracy, and our preconceptions give us a flawed sense of the world.

In the vein of Hans Rosling, I've done add'l research on media coverage vs actual stats for death. What's covered is what we most want to read about. As a society, we need many more lessons on statistics and the incentives behind news:

The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts

https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...

How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

EDIT: As some commenters point, news covers "new" things — and so of course it's at odds with data.

The problem is that most consumers of news don't understand that just because something is heavily covered doesn't mean it's common — or relevant input for personal decisions they make. This speaks to the issue of media literacy, and I'd argue is why Rosling's book is so important.

> The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die

They are precisely covered because they are exceptional. No one care about car accidents because that's a banal cause of death. But a plane crash is not. In countries like France where islamic terror attacks have became common place, small scale attacks causing a few deaths are not covered for days and days anymore.

Also event like a terror attack informs more about the state of a country and the world than an one suicide (suicide rate or aggregate can be valuable insight hough).

Absolutely, but many people use this news coverage to then make decisions. Statistically, this is crazy.

Like Rosling, the point is that we need to understand why the media covers things the way it does.

Of course. By its very nature, outliers are the only thing that news covers. Exceptions make news. Conventions do not. If you're hearing it on the news, it's useless information, like a TouTube video of a cat playing the piano while juggling mice.

Once upon a time, I think news was an invitation to get engaged in your community because change was needed or forthcoming, and as a citizen, it was your duty to know about the subject in order to contribute constructively, perhaps in a town hall meeting or at least in a civic (civil) conversation with neighbors.

Today nobody acts upon what they learn in big media news, other than to form misinformed opinions fraught with bias, to vote only every few years for a bad binary choice in rigged elections fielding untrustworthy candidates who pretend to address problems but actually perpetuate them via myopic self-interested gangsterism.

Pop news is 99% clickbait and 1% fact.

The point of mass media is propaganda and entertainment in that order.

And given that the point of entertainment, from the perspective of “the elite” (government officials but also other wealthy and powerful individuals who are a part of the same de facto governing system) the primary purpose of entertainment isn’t much different from a form of propaganda anyways. Mass media is largely about programming the populace. Now of course it’s not all produced with malicious intent, but that doesn’t stop the powers that be from influencing them, and by extension “the people” through mass media.

But this is just my relatively uninformed opinion based on casual observation, not any serious study of the issue. Although given that if this were studied and published in a journal it would have likely gone through institutions which are subject to the same system which would be criticized by the research so...how much good could that really do?

I suppose my cynicism towards the people I’m supposed to trust is the primary thing prevents me from having a more fact based view of the world.

> I suppose my cynicism towards the people I’m supposed to trust is the primary thing prevents me from having a more fact based view of the world.

How so? Is it not a fact that politicians can't be trusted, and that, as you said, the mainstream media is largely about programming the populace?

"Cynisism" is what people call realism when they want you to stop talking about reality.

Perhaps at one point I was realistic but I think at this point I’ve seen enough blatant deception that I am overly paranoid as sort of a defense mechanism. This is probably still more accurate than how I viewed things before, but all I really meant by cynicism is that I am conscious of the fact that I am probably even more distrustful than what would be reasonable, just as a result of negative experience. Perhaps I’m right, but I don’t have an objective rationale for this, it’s largely based on heuristics.

To be a bit more concrete, it’s true that politicians and the media are liars, but then to extend that further to education, entertainment, and those who are culturally influential in general can be quite the stretch outside of a few specific data points. And how is it connected? How does this system actually work? It’s so complex it’s almost immeasurable. A critical view of this is necessarily heavily influenced by intuition and emotion IMO since you’re unable to trust a large body of your learned information from that mindset.

> And how is it connected? How does this system actually work?

Look at things and keep asking: "Who benefits?"

The point of mass media is profit.

Consumers with poor sense of perspective and poor critical-thinking skills are more easily manipulated by advertisers. Therefore, dumbing down your viewers is in your direct financial interest.

"By its very nature, outliers are the only thing that news covers. Exceptions make news."

Eventually won't the fact that the news only covers exceptions reverse in on itself when covering a non exception is in itself the exception?

No, because the exception is with respect to people's experiences, not with respect to what the news reports. People experience regular stuff every day, whether the news reports it or not.

It's even in the name: news

The deregulated "news" industry is primarily motivated by profit, informing the public is secondary. That's why we see a handful of stories on repeat for days - maximizes profit, minimize journalism and education.

I would say they deserve different kinds of coverage.

A plane crash or terrorist attack is the kind of immediate news story that can dominate a news cycle for a week and that makes sense. But news papers and magazines also devote plenty of coverage to long term, on going problems, such as the coverage devoted to sexual harassment in the past year. And indeed, even when there have been no major terror attacks in several months, there is still always an endless stream of articles discussing the issue and how we might best approach it.

We should expect that our news sources to devote more of their long form, investigative pieces to domestic problems like heart disease and traffic accidents.

Agreed, but see my edit. The problem is that readers will see heavy coverage as "this is important" and I should be worried about this.

For example, after 9/11, 1k more Americans died in car crashes, because they decided not to fly.

Just so that people don't get the wrong idea: small scale terror attacks are not commonplace in France, nor anywhere else in Europe, by any reasonable sense of the word. From what I can recall, there have been two instances of fatal Islamist terror attacks in France in 2018. It's certainly in the single digits.

The fundamental problem in media is their financial incentives, leading to clickbait articles, and sometimes even fake news.

Government subsidies for proper, independent news reporting could help tremendously here. But unfortunately, now all politicians are looking at Facebook to solve the problem.

I think another way is to train readers to understand the issues, and over decades, change the incentives faced by media. Or for us to push back on the incentives that social networks set for media outlets.

I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers in this vein:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer

Are government-owned news outlets significantly better on this particular issue (of deaths)? What does the BBC, CBC, ABC, Al-Jazeera cover? I'd wager it's substantially similar. You'd have to have orders of magnitude more articles about people dying of heart disease (or whatever) to make up for it, and I don't think eg. the BBC spends its resources that way.

> Government subsidies for proper, independent news reporting could help tremendously here.

If your reporting depends on government subsidies, it's very much not independent.

I don't think it's media that fuels are fear of terrorism, I think it's actually the Terrorism. You are implying that the media makes it out to be worse than it is, I disagree. I think the media largely downplays terrorism and makes sure that we all think it just fell out of the sky and it's just crazy people and there's no rhyme or reason to it so there's no way to predict anything or take any action to stop it. The media just mollifies us and makes sure we don't get angry or take any steps, or do anything at all about it all except feel bad for the victims.

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