How over- and underrepresented are causes of death in the media?

To measure how over- or underrepresented each cause of death is, we calculated the ratio between a cause’s share of deaths and its share of news articles. In this chart, we’ve done this for coverage in the New York Times (the results are similar for the other two outlets).

It highlights that homicides and terrorism are extremely overrepresented. Homicides received 43 times more coverage than their share of deaths; terrorism received over 18,000 times more.

At the other end, we see that conditions like heart disease, stroke, and liver disease are very underrepresented.