Perceived vs Actual Cause of Death by Aaron Penne

I came across this graphic in three parts of perceived causes of death, news site headlines and actual causes of death in comparison.

The difference in certain areas isn't surprising to me, for example that deaths in the media caused by terrorism gain much more attention. Even if you would run the same data on violent deaths, you'd still have a very low terrorism ratio.

When voting or when having any debate about over-protective airport security or budgeting a government, keep the statistical data in mind. You can make the country safer and save more lives by voting not to go to war with a mainly imaginative threat compared to funding health in education and healthcare.

Obviously that's not how the human mind works and that's not how media work. Fear is a basic emotion and if that produces traffic, mass media will continue to frame a lot of topics with Terror in mind.

You can find more of Aarons data visualisation work on github: github.com/aaronpenne/data_visualization