Bokelskere.no

In newspaper journalism, there is a well-known aphorism: 'When a dog bites a man, that's not news; but when a man bites a dog...' These judgements on newsworthiness in mainstream media have been demonstrated quantitatively. One study in 2003, for example, looked at the BBC's health news coverage over several months, and calculated how many people had to die from a given cause for one story to appear. 8,571 people died from smoking for each story about smoking; but there were three stories for every death from new variant CJD, or 'mad cow disease'. Another, in 1992, looked at print-media coverage of drug deaths, and found that you needed 265 deaths from paracetamol poisoning for one story about such a death to appear in a paper; but every death from MDMA received, on average, one piece of news coverage.