Media Sensationalism Bias

The bad stuff is more likely to make headlines, so it's easy to get a distorted picture of the world. "We haven't been nuked this year!" is not exciting news. It sure is nice, though.

Most people don't. This seems to be quite prevalent in most societies. News media doing anything to get a story to grab viewers. Another example is school shootings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4

Those are certainly some scary anecdotes you have, but the stats don’t support them. Things just seem worse because the media (and social media) likes to make a political spectacle out of everything to drive engagement. Shootings are no longer murders, they are events to argue over gun control. Terrorist attacks are no longer about the attacks, they are used to argue about encryption, the free flow of information, and censorship.These events just seem more frequent because rather than being a

Humans causing issues is way less interesting to news media and as a result doesn't get the airtime.

Comparing media coverage of death with actual causes is misleading. There are many other reasons why something may be covered, other than just frequency of occurrence. Often coverage is for things that we might do something about. For example, there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is preventable. When systems break down and the barriers to it no longer work, we get Syria.

Mainly, IMHO, sensationalist "journalism" like this is much more of a reason why we can't have nice things, compared to the actual event predicted (which likely isn't going to happen, at least not to the extent described).

I don't think it's about excitement. It's just that what happened was so unusual that it captured everyone's imagination. It reminds me of an incident that happened in India probably a decade ago when a child fell into a open borewell. It was broadcast live for 2 full days until the child was rescued. But that wasn't the end of it. From then on, many children have fallen into open borewells but have never received the same amount of coverage. I guess it has more to do wi

I don’t think people should be too surprised that the news cycle doesn’t exactly reward the biggest tragedies. Not to mention the fact that it only became such a big story largely because so many people were dunking on the company/passengers. Unless you’re suggesting we should be spending more time dunking on dead refugees?

The one happened once, the other happens every day. That doesn't make it any less sad but that's the reason why the one got disproportionate coverage, it's 'news' by definition, it happened the first time. If it would happen every day it would definitely not be covered to this degree, plus there is the 'race against time' component which allows the news to be stretched over several news cycles.

Unfortunately, there have always been these kind of things happening in the world. The only thing that has changed is now we have the ability to share all of this in real time and the constant stream of news we are bombarded with.It also doesn't help that a story like the one you posted above, is more "click-worthy" than a story about how someone from the same Boston Bomb blast helped saved people, made tourniquets out of their shorts and shirt, and put their own safety in jeopardy just to he