Absolutely insane that this article doesn't recognize that there is a human interest difference in untimely death, and poor health and old age.
The news isn't supposed to be representative cross-section of reality. If it was, 99.9% of the newscast would be "most people went to work today, fed their family, went home and slept." The news is there to tell you the outliers of today's events.
Some level of editorializing is always going to be needed to distinguish signal from noise, but to be clear, the point of cable news is to tell you that everything is on fire, all the time. And that’s not because it’s some sort of normative ideal, but rather that the skinner machine figured out that humans watch that stuff more than something more representative of reality.
There are a lot of valid criticisms of the modern news media landscape.
But I think one thing is for sure -- they're not a public health raw data reporting system. There is nothing newsworthy about "heart disease" written on death certificates of people dying in old age. This is a fact more appropriate for a health class.
It gets close to dancing around my point, but the article actually doesn't mention old age at all.
The article insinuates that we don't care about heart disease, because heart disease is boring and common.
But death is a lot more complicated of an issue to society than this. Society expects that a young healthy person in the prime of their life is going to be around for their family and their friends. Other people are probably counting on them to still exist tomorrow. By contrast when an elderly person has been suffering on their deathbed with dementia for 10 years, and dies of heart disease, it's so much different situation for society, that person may not have many friends or family left, and they may not be able to interact with them, even if they are alive for another year. And the friends and family they have left may have been going through the grieving process for years already.
Society does not see all deaths as equal things no matter the circumstance. And so it's silly for this article to pretend that the only thing different between any of these deaths is the cause listed on the death certificate.
That section implies that news sources report on this because otherwise customers wouldn't be entertained enough to keep paying. The piece doesn't really engage with the argument you're responding to.
Your argument makes sense, but also ignores that people's perception of relative risk is greatly influenced by the news. You indirectly created a bag called "timely death" as if it were "non postponable death".
What I mean is that the time of "timely deaths" can be influenced by human action. If most people die of cancer and heart disease, we should work on avoiding an early death from these causes.
If we can add 2 years of time to our "timely" death of heart disease by eating better, we should do so instead of worrying about terrorism.
It's not the responsibility of news organizations to educate people. Health education should probably come from our educational institutions.
The statistics on the left hand in the article, unfortunately, have conflated preventable deaths with unpreventable deaths. While some of them made people preventable, we really have no clue how many. However, every single non-preventable death is included in that column. Talk about bias...
But when the outliers create an impression that is a falsehood - like that cities are intrinsically dangerous because of extreme levels of violent crime because violent crime is what gets reported?
The news isn't supposed to be representative cross-section of reality. If it was, 99.9% of the newscast would be "most people went to work today, fed their family, went home and slept." The news is there to tell you the outliers of today's events.