Media, Death and Google
David Kopp
CEO at Sleep Doctor. Experienced consumer healthcare CEO, advisor and Board Member. Most recently: CEO @ Healthline Media creating 5X PE investor return in under 4 years.
My headline isn't entirely misleading. There are few topics on which truth is as final and unequivocal as death. Yet this article and chart Healthline just published is fascinating and emblematic of the "truth" challenge that we face in the media.
In my personal mindfulness practice, I often contemplate the "three truths" -- your truth, my truth and the actual truth. Here it is, in all its morbidity, in stark relief. The CDC tells us what actually causes death. The New York Times tells us what we (as a proxy for the media world) think matters most to users. And Google tells us what users actually worry about. Heart Disease is the loser and I'm not sure that there is a winner.
I can't help but notice that the media's perspective and user's worries are fairly highly correlated (click through to see the interactive version of the graphic which makes this more clear). Are we in the media programming people's fears...or is media just reflecting what people want? Either way, I think the better question is why media is failing to write enough and talk enough about what is literally killing us.
If you clicked through above, do yourself and your loved ones a favor while you're contemplating death and truth, and read about what you can do to prolong your life.
Senior Quantitative Developer and Data Scientist, M.S. Finance
5 年Great article David. Looking at the pie charts reported by each data source, invites questions, how can the Heart Disease rate as reported by the CDC be order of magnitudes higher than the New York Times and Google Trends?? If they could publish their pie charts along with the original source data and a way to re-create their analysis we could gain an understanding of what lead to the differences.? Always skeptical of statistical summaries without full understanding of assumptions and rules, and the actual data sources.??
CEO | Communication Consultant | Leadership Advisory | Change Navigation | Leadership | Ex Amex | Ex Warner Media | Ex FastCo — Boosting Cross-Team Collaboration to Reduce Rework + Protect Profits
5 年Shocking how few searches for heart disease.
What a fascinating article David, kudos to the team. Like Bruce, I'd also be interested in a segmentation by age. Bet it would throw a completely different spin on the data.
Chief Product Officer, InComm Benefits, an InComm Payments Co. Product Leader | Team Builder | Strategist | Investor
5 年Super interesting David!? I wonder what the data would look like if it were segmented by age group?? I would think that media consumption doesn't really follow the same weighting as deaths (ie heart disease happens a lot more in older population, who may have less overall google usage, etc.) .?
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5 年We missed an opportunity here to talk about media's impact on our life span.?