A new study from the Annenberg School for Communication shows how mainstream news coverage understates the risk of chronic illnesses.
Recent research by Calvin Isch, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and a member of the Computational Social Science Lab, looks into the tendency of media coverage to focus on sensational causes of death rather than chronic illnesses. While chronic diseases such as heart disease and cancer are the leading cause of death in the United States — accounting for 70% of deaths — they are only sparsely covered by news outlets, which tend to focus on more sensational risks such as homicide and terrorism.
During his research on this bias, Isch collected monthly data on 14 mortality risks using keyword searches on over 800,000 major United States news outlet articles published between 1999 and 2020. While one article is written per 323 deaths due to heart disease, the leading cause of deaths, 36 articles are written per death due to terrorism, which accounts for 0.00008% of overall deaths.
He also investigated whether this bias might manifest in other ways by analyzing different mentions of health interventions. According to Isch, mitigation strategies fall under three main categories: policy, behavioral, and technological. He found that authors tend to focus on the individual behavior of chronic disease patients while emphasizing the need for collective policy solutions to combat sensationalized health risks.
There are several risks posed by this discrepancy, according to Isch's research. Media consumers are less aware of the mortality risks of chronic illnesses, while overestimating rare, sensationalist risks, which could lead to a skewed allocation of political and lifestyle priorities.
As of January 2024, more than half of U.S. adults were not aware that heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the country for the past century. At the same time, Americans overestimate the risks posed by terrorist attacks and immigrant crimes.
Implications of this discrepancy are wide. A Republican budget blueprint released at the beginning of February includes plans to focus on 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda and to increase U.S. defense spending. Tax cuts are planned to be offset by reductions in federal Medicaid spending.
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