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This is so strange to me. It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon. No one cares that the morning commute's traffic is just as it was the day before and the day before that, but they do care that an accident shut down the main highway. It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.

At some point, media literacy went out the window in the US. Probably right around the time humanities education did.

discuss

dahart|2 months ago

The source article elaborates on the reasons that dramatically over-reporting homicide and terrorism is bad for the public. One of those reasons is that it obscures the actual changes in our lives, it hides what’s truly ‘new’. In that sense, they are fully agreeing with you: news is supposed to communicate on what changed, not what stayed the same. I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re supposed to report on the uncommon, but rather they should report on the delta, i.e. what’s different from yesterday.

If traffic went down by 10x over your lifetime, and the frequency of reporting on accidents went up and they started making a bigger and bigger deal of smaller and smaller accidents that didn’t even cause traffic jams, but they didn’t mention that last part - then you get a very distorted and misleading view from the reporting, right? But that’s what’s actually happening with homicide and terrorism.

https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

djoldman|2 months ago

> It's the news, it's supposed to report on the uncommon.... It was commonly understood that news represents the unusual, not the usual.

News organizations could report on people dying of extremely rare diseases and these are rarely reported on compared to terrorism/homicide.

Rarity is not the best predictor of whether a news organization will cover something. "Likelihood of engagement/rage/shock/fear/anxiety" is the best predictor of story coverage, although this overlaps well with "uncommon happening."

There's absolutely nothing special about news organizations (beyond engaging in 1st amendment activity regularly): they want to make money, they're businesses.