Selective risk awareness
Disease risk awareness is one of the ways the media can help public health, and infections caused by waterborne organisms are one of the world’s leading public health problems. That’s not why this story is at the top of Stuff’s front page:
If you click through, you find that she was in the US, that primary amoebic meningoencephalitis is extremely rare — with about three cases a year in the US — and that the last NZ case was during the Muldoon administration.
The children around the world who die every minute from more common water-borne infections mostly aren’t the right sort of children to make good clickbait in New Zealand.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I wish they stop putting these horrific stories about odd accidental deaths of children on the stuff website.
Another news item on today (and yesterday) is about a boy who died on a water slide.
These children live in far away countries, aren’t known to anyone in NZ and died in rare accidents. There is no good reason to report on these horrible deaths other than to make the reader feel horrible.
I clicked on it because I thought it must have happened in NZ and then I though it must have been a NZer but it was nothing to do with NZ at all.
I’m sure that people who really want to find out about horrific deaths of foreign children can go and find a website about it. This doesn’t need to be “front page” “news” on stuff (or even any kind of news on Stuff).
8 years ago
Media websites are now all front page, as they put all headlines on one continuous page- I think its to allow easier viewing by touch screens on phones and tablets. That is by default the same page that desktop screens get ( adjusted for screen size).
The era of ‘important news’ going on a separate ‘front page’ is gone, and while I dont know, I suspect those stories that get clicked more migrate further up the main page.
8 years ago
Not everything ends up on the photo+refer part of the front page — there’s a separate ‘Latest News’ section, and many stories go straight to a subsection (eg ‘Life and Style’)
8 years ago