• Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 days ago

    It’s the media cycle.

    They basically see “warehouse on fire” getting a lot of views, so they start reporting on other fires too, disregarding the actual cause of the fire".

    Same happens with other stuff too. Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally, but because one occurrence got a lot of views, we see it reported more.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally

      I mean, it’s hard to say without doing some kind of actual statistical analysis.

      If the reporting is purely stochastic, driven by arbitrary changes in click-through habits, then it is very possible that fires are more common and people are more interested because they’ve been seeing more of them in their neighborhoods. It’s also possible that fires are less common and people are curious about them because they’re such a novelty.

      Idfk. But I wouldn’t be quite so blase about an uptick in stories absent any actual baseline of the event.