They are precisely covered because they are exceptional. No one care about car accidents because that's a banal cause of death. But a plane crash is not. In countries like France where islamic terror attacks have became common place, small scale attacks causing a few deaths are not covered for days and days anymore.
Also event like a terror attack informs more about the state of a country and the world than an one suicide (suicide rate or aggregate can be valuable insight hough).
Once upon a time, I think news was an invitation to get engaged in your community because change was needed or forthcoming, and as a citizen, it was your duty to know about the subject in order to contribute constructively, perhaps in a town hall meeting or at least in a civic (civil) conversation with neighbors.
Today nobody acts upon what they learn in big media news, other than to form misinformed opinions fraught with bias, to vote only every few years for a bad binary choice in rigged elections fielding untrustworthy candidates who pretend to address problems but actually perpetuate them via myopic self-interested gangsterism.
Pop news is 99% clickbait and 1% fact.
But this is just my relatively uninformed opinion based on casual observation, not any serious study of the issue. Although given that if this were studied and published in a journal it would have likely gone through institutions which are subject to the same system which would be criticized by the research so...how much good could that really do?
I suppose my cynicism towards the people I’m supposed to trust is the primary thing prevents me from having a more fact based view of the world.
How so? Is it not a fact that politicians can't be trusted, and that, as you said, the mainstream media is largely about programming the populace?
"Cynisism" is what people call realism when they want you to stop talking about reality.
To be a bit more concrete, it’s true that politicians and the media are liars, but then to extend that further to education, entertainment, and those who are culturally influential in general can be quite the stretch outside of a few specific data points. And how is it connected? How does this system actually work? It’s so complex it’s almost immeasurable. A critical view of this is necessarily heavily influenced by intuition and emotion IMO since you’re unable to trust a large body of your learned information from that mindset.
Look at things and keep asking: "Who benefits?"
Consumers with poor sense of perspective and poor critical-thinking skills are more easily manipulated by advertisers. Therefore, dumbing down your viewers is in your direct financial interest.
Eventually won't the fact that the news only covers exceptions reverse in on itself when covering a non exception is in itself the exception?
A plane crash or terrorist attack is the kind of immediate news story that can dominate a news cycle for a week and that makes sense. But news papers and magazines also devote plenty of coverage to long term, on going problems, such as the coverage devoted to sexual harassment in the past year. And indeed, even when there have been no major terror attacks in several months, there is still always an endless stream of articles discussing the issue and how we might best approach it.
We should expect that our news sources to devote more of their long form, investigative pieces to domestic problems like heart disease and traffic accidents.
For example, after 9/11, 1k more Americans died in car crashes, because they decided not to fly.
Like Rosling, the point is that we need to understand why the media covers things the way it does.
The deregulated "news" industry is primarily motivated by profit, informing the public is secondary. That's why we see a handful of stories on repeat for days - maximizes profit, minimize journalism and education.
Government subsidies for proper, independent news reporting could help tremendously here. But unfortunately, now all politicians are looking at Facebook to solve the problem.
I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers in this vein:
If your reporting depends on government subsidies, it's very much not independent.
In the vein of Hans Rosling, I've done add'l research on media coverage vs actual stats for death. What's covered is what we most want to read about. As a society, we need many more lessons on statistics and the incentives behind news:
The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die
https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts
https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...
How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism
https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
EDIT: As some commenters point, news covers "new" things — and so of course it's at odds with data.
The problem is that most consumers of news don't understand that just because something is heavily covered doesn't mean it's common — or relevant input for personal decisions they make. This speaks to the issue of media literacy, and I'd argue is why Rosling's book is so important.