Newsworthy Deaths

Our World in Data has an excellent writeup of earlier research by Eisensee and Strömberg. 

How many deaths does it take for a natural disaster to be newsworthy? This is a question researchers Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg asked in a 2007 study. The two authors found that for every person killed by a volcano, nearly 40,000 people have to die of a food shortage to get the same probability of coverage in US televised news. In other words, the type of disaster matters to how newsworthy networks find it to be. The visualizations below show the extent of this observed “news effect”.

In other words, the famine you haven’t heard much about is more important than you think.

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