It’s worth looking at if the NYT and WaPo are reporting on terrorism from a policy or international affairs angle, rather than fearmongering Fox News.
This is terrorism as a cause of death. There is nothing in the way they analyzed the information that would consider policy or internation affairs – that’s irrelevant to this study.
While this article makes a good point overall, the focus on just the death rates doesn’t really tell a complete or cohesive story.
The rates that these deaths are discussed needs to be analyzed from the perspective of what percentages are they of the overall news stories. And, there is a need for a deeper analysis of the context of the stories. For example, a story that is really about a war may mention gun violence or terrorist deaths - and it is likely to be repeated several times throughout the story. However, that story is about war, and not really about the type of death.
The reason for the skew in representation is quite simple: metrics / telemetry data. These outlets have developed very sophisticated systems that track the engagement with the articles they publish. The amount of information they are able to gather allows them to build profiles of their audience, and from there be able to predict the engagement that each article will get. IOW – they are serving their audience, and the audience has shown that this is the information that they want to engage with.
One additional thing: in building these profiles, they are taking into account revenue streams, everything from subscription levels, advertising engagement, etc. They are living on thin margins financially and have to absolutely everything they can to make a profit.
Well also they are more likely to report the rarer, more dramatic ways of dying.
What would be the alternative? Just a daily article listing all the people who died from heart disease? Where’s the journalist and narrative in that?
