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Photo by Muhammad Taha Ibrahima via unsplash<\/p>\n Photo by Muhammad Taha Ibrahima via unsplash<\/p>\n
For almost 30 years, GNN has been busting global media\u2019s 24-hour gloom and doom cycle with the premise that bad news doesn\u2019t have to sell, and good news isn\u2019t rare at all.<\/p>\n
A case-in-point for this outlet\u2019s publishing mission is a study<\/a> recently released on Our World in Data that showed how bad news events like murder and terrorism are extraordinarily over-covered by American media.<\/p>\n For example, homicide receives approximately 4,300% more media coverage than its share of deaths across the American population every year.<\/p>\n Put differently, if every death in America was reported on, news stories on homicides would be fewer in number by a factor of 43.<\/p>\n According to the study the same is true for terrorism\u2014by a staggering 18,000 percent.<\/p>\n Relying on Media Cloud, an open-access platform for media analysis, the team behind the study analyzed news headlines covering the 12 most-common causes of death in America, plus homicide, drug overdoses, and terrorism, as these were perceived by the authors to receive an outsized share of media coverage.<\/p>\n The team then gathered news stories from three of the largest news outlets in America: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News. Their criteria was set to ensure the stories focused on these causes of death as the topic, rather than in passing.<\/p>\n \u201cHeart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage,\u201d the study team, consisting of Hannah Ritchie, Tuna Acisu, and Edouard Mathieu, found and wrote in their presentation.<\/p>\n \u201cRare\u2014but dramatic\u2014events such as homicides and terrorism received more than half of all media coverage,\u201d despite together representing less than 1% of all deaths in America.<\/p>\n Drug overdoses were also overrepresented\u2014by 4-times their share of mortality events in the American population. Suicide was overrepresented by 80%.<\/p>\n \u201cNearly six-in-ten Americans still see international terrorism as a critical threat to the United States, despite the domestic impact on the US being relatively low for two decades,\u201d the authors write. Indeed, terrorism killed just 16 Americans last year, about half the number of Americans killed in elevator accidents<\/a>. If you\u2019re not thinking twice about climbing into a rickety elevator, than you probably shouldn\u2019t overly worry about terrorism.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/credit-Ritchie-et-al-on-CC-BY-License-1024x677.jpg\")
\u2013 credit, Ritchie et al on CC-BY License<\/p>\n