Newsworthy is not necessarily important, tho we attribute importance to what we see on the news!

For several days the media were filled with the November terrorist attack in Mumbai. It received even more coverage than the Mumbai bombing two years ago that killed 180 people. However, the Economist reports:

In the first 11 months of this year, according to the Institute for Conflict Management, a Delhi think-tank, nearly 2,500 Indians died in conflict.

So why did we hear so much about this attack and so little about the the several chronic insurgencies going on in India?

The Economist also reports that

1,000 Indian children die of diarrhoeal sickness every day

which I calculate to be 365,000 kids per year from a preventable, treatable disease.

Last year 130,000 people died on India’s roads, 60% more than in China, which has four times as many cars.

So why do we hear so much about the relatively minor mortality (in a population of 1.1 billion) caused by a terrorist attack, and the far worse mortality due to disease and accidents, mortality that could be cut dramatically by engineering and health services?

My point is that the criteria used by the media to decide what news to cover is not the importance of a problem, but rather its "newsworthyness". Terrorism is newsworthy, and more so when it results in deaths of Americans or Europeans or when it hits affluent people in fancy neighborhoods. It becomes especially newsworthy if an event lasts long enough that the cameras can get there, and if it generates pictures with just the right amount of shock value -- fire rather than blood and gore.

On the other hand, the death toll from diarrhea and accidents have been with us for a long time, and if we are not tired of hearing about them the media are tired of covering them. They are not newsworthy.

That would not be important if we did not form our estimates of the priority of problems in large part by how well we remember examples of the problem arising. The people most likely to remember the death of a child from diarrhea probably don't have much power to affect policy, while the people watching the terrorist attack on television may well have influence.

I would rather see mass demonstrations of Indians demanding better access to the public for potable water, better disposal of waste, and better safer roads, as opposed to people militating for a hard line against Pakistan, where the November terrorists may have been trained.