Interesting. I personally feel differently. For one thing, I find the fact that the plane crash is likely just to kill me quickly (while the car crash could lead to a lot of pain and not death) to be somewhat reassuring rather than more nerve-wracking. [And, of course, we are comparing the numbers killed in these sorts of things…If we just compared the numbers who experience plane crashes or car crashes then the odds of experiencing a car crash would be several orders of magnitude higher than those of experiencing a plane crash.]
For another, I find I get most stressed in situations of intermediate control…i.e., where I have limited but not essentially zero control. Thus, I am generally not stressed by driving a car on one extreme or flying in an airplane on the other. But, I am often stressed being a passenger in a car. I think I find this more stressful than the airplane both because I can see the dangers more readily (“he’s really tailgating that car ahead of us”) and because I can’t “let go” since I still feel like there is something I can do even if my control is limited. (E.g., I can stay alert and warn the driver if I see something, or even suggest to the driver that he maybe should slow down or leave more following distance, or at night I can try to make sure that the driver doesn’t doze off. Thus, being a passenger for me often takes all the vigilance of driving but with very little of the reassurance which comes from feeling like I am really in control.)
Does anybody else feel this way or am I just a strange bird?
Some good theories here. I just want to add a case study (of sorts) of my own–the Mad Cow scare of around 1996.
I think Mad Cow caught on because it was just so insidious, and, as pervert said, so eminently avoidable–don’t wanna get it? Don’t eat meat. This is a horrible disease to contract (any disease with a prion as a pathogen is pretty bad, and Mad Cow is no different). Anything that slowly eats away your brain and is so poorly understood is bound to be overblown and fear-inducing. The British government took effective (and later, overzealous) measures to combat the disease, and there was a surprisingly low number of cases, but it induced a panic both here in America and overseas.
The three salient factors were–
preventability (the disease was diet-related)
sheer lack of knowledge of the pathogen (prions are poorly understood and hard to kill)
horrific effects of disease (severe degenerative neuropathy)
All of which, I think, fit rather nicely into pervert’s explanation.
Because people are timid idiots. Most of us have been raised to expect a world where we will all live long dull lives until we die of old age. When something shatters that fantasy of a world completely under our control, people get outraged and demand action. I imagine that it is due to the fact that for most people, dieing in an accident or by some other random occurance is fairly rare.
It all harks back to the same instinct that George Carlin talked about when he said that the first thing a person does at the side of your casket is to subtrace their age from yours, to guess how long they might have left.
In other words, we have a tendency to place ourselves in the dead person’s shoes.
Our general perception is that most people who die in a car crash barely knew what hit them. A split second of panic, perhaps, but then it’s all over.
If you’re six miles up in a plane, you have that long to contemplate your doom as you tumble uncontrollably out of the sky. Sure, there are other ways to die in a plane, but I believe that’s the meme.
In the terrorist instance, or even the eartquake one, there is the element of lack of control. Many who die at the terrorist’s hands were powerless to change the events that brought about the attack, and are not responsible. Similar with the earthquake.
So there are elements of anticipation and preventability that feed into our reaction, along with empathy.
I don’t think anyone can say of their own aniticipated demise: “Dying peacefully in my sleep in my old age surrounded by loved ones, or trapped alone in the inaccessible upper floors of a burning building, makes no difference to me how it happens.”
Our dismay arises from our sympathy for those who could not possibly have wished to experience their last moments on earth the way they did.
I wish I could find cites to some of the things I am bringing up. I am simply remembering some stuff I read back in the early eighties. <Yea, I was a well read grade school student, yea, that’s it>
I recall a study amongst rats. They were placed in cages which could give them electric shocks. Some of the rats had no control whatsoever over the shocks. They came at random regardless of what the rats did. The others had a little control. They had a button which if they pressed it often enough would inhibit the shocks. The study found that the rats with a little control had far worse reactions to theri situation. They became much more nervous. They had far more health problems. If I recall correctly, they found that the rats with no control at all eventually simply accepted that random electric shocks were a part of life, so to speak. They were much more calm.
Does anyone else know of any evidence that some sort of a mechanism to ignore uncontrolable adverse stimuli might have evolved in humans?
Polerius I doubted your numbers for flu deaths until I looked it up. This article from the Salt Lake Tribune suggests that over 45000 people died in 1999. That’s a lot of folks dieing from what most people usually consider a mild inconvenience.
Further to the point about traffic fatalities…
Every year many people die in traffic-related incidents on our roads. Every Christmas over here, the news programs all show a state-by-state breakdown of the holiday fatalities (what a cheery idea!).
I’ve never understood why 30 people dying on our roads in the space of three weeks was so newsworthy. I mean, yes it’s tragic, and I feel sorry anyone died in that manner, but why isn’t the road toll newsworthy year-round? Why only during that one period? It’s almost as if we pretend that driving is extremely safe (maybe because it’s a day-to-day activity for most) most of the time, but then during the holidays it’s extremely dangerous. Yes, there’s often more traffic on the roads at certain locations and times, but there’s no big newsworthy uproar about the dangers of peak-hour traffic and a body count on commuters.
Is it because if we recognised the danger in something we do regularly, we couldn’t cope? Most of us do not fly, come into contact with terrorists or experience natural disasters on a daily or weekly basis, so we focus on those instead.
I feel exactly that way, but then I may be strange too. I experience a lot of anxiety being a passenger in a car with an aggressive driver. I try to carpool as much as I can because it’s better for the environment and more economical for me, but it seems to stress me out almost to the point where it’s becoming a phobia. One particular person I carpool with drives me nuts because he will do things like accellerate right into the blind spot of another car that is signalling to come into his lane. He just trusts that they can see him, I guess. But then when I drive by myself, I often take the same sorts of chances that bother me so much when someone else is driving, and experience much less anxiety merely because I’m the one in control. So I guess that’s a good example of a situation where I behave irrationally.
Do you really have to ask why a terrorist attack is newsworthy? That seems a bit absurd to me. The fact that car crashes (or the flu, or whatever) kill people every day and terrorism/plane crashes/disasters are so rare make them newsworthy. And again, there’s the difference in scale.
In the spirit of the OP, I think you do.
In the real world, it is obvious why these things are newsworthy but the OP was asking why they bother us so much.
I contend the media plays a big role in bringing such events to the forefront of our knowledge and in chicken-and-egg style, one must ask whether they fulfill a demand or create a demand for this information.
This appears, to me, to go to the heart of the original question.
I’m not sure how you’re supposed to answer that. Should I suppose we were living in a time with no mass media? If so, which story would spread further- a tragedy that kills a large number of people, or something like a car accident?
You’re not being asked to.
If, for argument’s sake, there was no mass media and Joe Public heard in passing that a plane had crashed on the other side of the world killing 200 people and he also heard disease had killed 200 in one day in the same country - would there be any difference in the way he viewed these incidents? I doubt it.
Therefore, unless a reader/viewer is personally affected by an event, media reporting is what gives a particular story importance.
Why does media report the plane crash and not the disease?
I guess that is what the OP is asking.
Why do media consider one event more compelling than the other? Do they assume their readership think the same and give them what they want or do the readers find it compelling only because that is what they get?
News judgment is based partly on what the people making the decision think the public will be interested in. I think something that is very visual like a disaster is more likely to get coverage because you have to show your audience something.
If you had a plane crash killing 200 in some foreign country and 200 people dying of a disease in one day, both could be news. The plane crash definitely would, and the disease story could depending on the background of the story. As I said, the prime factor that leads to coverage is something being unusual. Planes don’t crash that often relative to how many of them there are. New diseases or outbreaks and such generally make the news, but things that have been out there for a long time and have been covered previously don’t tend to get as much attention.
I think there’s no way to figure it out, so I’m not going to try.
Back in the 80’s there was a plane crashed at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. It was determined that the plane was downed by the phenomenom that came to be labeled as a “microburst” The plane was pushed down out of the air.
The school secretary of the baking school I was at had a brother in law on that plane. He had lived in Kansas City, and two local stations called the grieving family, wanting to interview them about it. One station took “no” for an answer, the other got pushy, and the family had to get rude to put them off. Although I would not have called it rude, considering the circumstances.
The secretary was angry about the whole affair, her comment being “If he had died alone in car crash they wouldn’t have cared. But just because he died with a bunch of other people…”
My original question was not about the media, and which stories they report. My question is, once the media tell us “200 people died today in a plane crash/terrorist attack/train accident/etc” why does it bother us? Logically, we should think, “so what? 200 people is negligible compared to the total number of people dying every day.”
Also, to address your point of what the media covers, don’t compare one plane crash with one car accident. On the day of a plane crash, a TV station or newspaper can choose to report “150 people died in a plane crash today”, or report “150 people died today in car accidents across the US”. I guess they choose the former, because it is more rare. But, why should *we * be bothered by the former more than the latter? Logically, we should be more bothered by the car accident fatalities because they occur every single day, not once in a while.
Come to think of it, if the media did actually report “150 people died today in car accidents across the US”, every day for a couple of years, and then a plane crash happened, and they reported “150 people died in a plane crash today”, we might all indeed say “so what?”
So, maybe the reason we don’t say “so what?” now is that we don’t hear of the daily deaths day in and day out and we might subconsciously supress our internal “estimate” about how many people actually die every day.
That’s a good way to look at it too Polerius. If the media were to continually give us a running total of the numbers of people who died in various ways each day (perhaps with a running total for the year) we would have something to compare any tragic story with. I have a feeling, though, that this would not suit their purposes.
I would speculate that rather than “News judgment is based partly on what the people making the decision think the public will be interested in”, a story is considered “News worthy” if it thought to “sell papers”. I may be wrong, but papers are not often sold by the meat of the story as much as the headline. consider these two.
“200 people die in firey plan crash”
“200 people died in trafic today just like every other day this year.”
Honestly (ignoring the novelty of the second one for a second) which headline would grab your attention more? Its kind of like advertising. The more attention you get, the mroe sales you get. The type of attention is almost (almost, I say) irrelevant.
I agree with this and would like to add to it. Generally, human beings function daily without considering their own mortality. When something unexpected happens that causes death, all of a sudden a curtain of denial gets pulled away with the sudden thought that “Oh my God, that could have been me!” To get the curtain back in proper place, we busy ourselves with whys and what went wrongs ostensibly to fix the situation but really to make damn sure it won’t happen to us in the future.
I base this idea from what I experienced three years ago when I had a sudden stroke. I went to bed one night and woke up having a stroke. At age 24. The near-death experience has taken me years to get over and now my curtain of denial is almost in place only occasionally blown by anxiety attacks. Other people’s reactions to what happened to me consisted of asking me tons of questions about “Why?” and “What could you have done differently”. For a while, these questions made me feel really insecure and upset until I realized that people who ask these questions were trying to verify that I’m an anomaly and what happened to me will never happen to them.
Sometimes s**t happens and you have to move onward and learn from it. Looking back with fear doesn’t help. We’re all going to die some day. Hundreds of years ago, they didn’t have inquiries into who was to blame for the Black Plague. I’m just saying…
Maybe it’s the age we live in with the youth obsession and extended life spans. It’s like we’re steeped in a culture of Death Fear and avoiding this fear dictates all our actions.
