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

We focused on causes of death and media coverage in the United States in 2023.

The full list of all causes of death is very long, and since many causes are very rare, we didn’t investigate all of them. But our analysis accounts for 75% of all deaths in the US in 2023.³ 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.

We used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to calculate each cause’s share of the total.⁴ We then 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. We selected these three because they are among the biggest national news organizations, are extremely popular, and are seen as being on different parts of the political spectrum.

To count the number of mentions, we relied on Media Cloud, an open-source platform regularly used for media analysis. In an extended methodology document, we provide many more details on how we constructed the data. Two things are important to mention here.

• For each cause of death, we included synonyms in our search. So, when searching for mentions of “homicide”, we also included mentions of related terms such as “murder”, “killer”, and other terms. For “heart disease”, we included terms like “heart attack”, “cardiac arrest”, “heart failure”, and many others.
• We only counted articles where a cause of death — or its related terms — was mentioned more than once. This ensures that our analysis is focused on reporting on causes of death rather than just articles that mention a cause of death in passing. Additionally, this approach reduces the number of false positives and noise in our results.

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

You can see the results of our analysis in the chart below.

There are two big takeaways from this analysis. The first one is that the actual distribution of deaths shown on the left 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.

The insight in this comparison, then, is not about differences between partisan media. It’s about the difference between actual causes of death and what the news tells Americans about. Those differences — as we can see in the chart — are huge.

Heart disease and cancer accounted for 55% 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 2023.⁵

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

Another way to visualize this data is to measure how over- or underrepresented each cause is.

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Why is the media so biased towards dramatic risks?

The fact that the media focuses on dramatic, emotive events — and much less on “everyday”, more common mortality risks — has been found in several studies.⁶ These studies have shown that this mismatch has existed for a long time, and that genuine changes in death rates between causes of death account for a tiny fraction of the changes in media coverage.⁷

Our analysis adds to the evidence, with updated data for 2023.

Why does this mismatch exist?

Even outside the news, some of the most successful television series are intense, crime-filled dramas. Disaster movies pull in record numbers at the box office. One of the most popular podcast genres is “true crime,” where we spend hours listening to the gripping, scary tales of serial killers or con artists.

It's not surprising, then, that we’re much more likely to click on a news story about the latest murder or disaster than one about heart or kidney disease. And because media organizations need traffic and attention to survive, they and the public are stuck in a reinforcing feedback loop where rare events are always in the headlines and chronic problems get drowned out.

This is not just a problem with the modern media environment. The audience for this type of media has always been there. What’s changed is the reporting frequency: rather than getting one newspaper in the morning, we are bombarded with updates almost in real-time. We also now receive news from a much larger geographical area; it’s not just about what’s happened in our own town, but also about what’s happened on the other side of the country, or even the world.

Does this bias really matter?

Our point is not that we think the New York Times, Washington Post, or Fox News’ coverage should exactly match the distribution of causes of death. A newspaper that constantly covers heart disease and kidney failure would be a boring one that soon goes out of business. Even though our mission at Our World in Data is to cover the world’s largest problems, our own writing and data publications also don’t precisely match the scale of those problems. We expect we will be closer to the real distribution than the mainstream media, but there will still be some mismatch.

The reason we’re doing this analysis is to make you or other readers more aware of this selection bias. The frequency of news coverage doesn’t reflect what’s happening across millions or billions of people, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking it does.

Why, then, do we think that this bias matters? Does it actually affect people’s perceptions of problems?

In a large survey among US adults, people who consumed local crime news “often” were more than three times more likely to say they were “extremely concerned” about crime affecting them or their family than those who rarely or never read local crime news.⁸

And if we don’t hear about what’s happening to heart disease rates, treatments, or the odds of surviving cancer, we might wrongly imagine that no progress has been made. Yet childhood cancer deaths have plummeted over the last 50 years. Even among adults, death rates from cancer have fallen dramatically since the 1990s. So too have death rates from heart disease.

This perception gap about the world matters, and the media is not doing a good job of trying to close it.

Methodology

If you’re interested in digging deeper, we provide a more detailed methodological document about how this data was generated, and a few additional analyses.

Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Edouard Mathieu (2025) - “Does the news reflect what we die from?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie and Tuna Acisu and Edouard Mathieu},
    title = {Does the news reflect what we die from?},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2025},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from}
}

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