I was so surprised at how much coverage the Balloon Boy got a week and a half ago. I remember thinking, as it took over my twitter feed, "this is weird, but why is everyone so enticed?" Then we all found out it was a hoax, and it made sense. Everyone was talking about it because all the mainstream media was talking about it. And they were talking about it because they had been alerted, on purpose, by Richard Heene to garner media attention. It really was a great example of how we only talk about what the media wants us to talk about. Scary!

So I came across this visualization of wide-spread media scare stories. This time frame was from 2000 to 2009, and it was so interesting to see how many stories there were at the beginning versus later in the year. Even better, included were the actual number of deaths from these incidents. Take for instance, the "cell phones cause tumors" story. Most started in 2007, and though there have been some spikes, there haven't been even any deaths from these "tumors" yet. Mad cow disease is another interesting topic - there were 204 deaths overall from it, and there were a couple of separate spikes about it since 2000.

The most surprising data for me was the killer wasps story. This story was represented by low rounded hills, instead of the intense spikes of some of the other stories like SARS and Swine flu. This means there weren't a lot of stories, and they weren't talked about a lot. But the interesting part was that this epidemic had the most deaths over the last nine years than any of the stories with the large spikes.

This data really drove the point home that the mainstream media decides what we know, and what becomes important to us. This is definitely concerning, but thank goodness we live in a country where we have freedom of speech. At least I can decide what to listen to, when to stop reading the stories, and I can find reliable data to back up opinions.

Sources

 Mountains Out of Molehills, Information is Beautiful