Both the information and the omission of information can influence the behavior of people after reading a news item in a media outlet.
In the case of fatal accidents due to external causes, it is evident that news about traffic accidents with color photographs, impact much more than news about accidental falls, choking or suicides that barely occupy a few lines.
This treatment of the information does not seem to accompany to transmit to the public opinion a message of prevention and warning about the accidents, unless they are of traffic.
After this reality, the media should consider a responsibility that makes them rethink their deontological codes?
The press, like everyone else, is dependent upon the quality of data collection, the relevance, currency, validity and reliability of measures, the ethical environment in which data are collected and the limitations of understanding generalizability, suitability or adequacy of sampling techniques, storage and security of large data bases, and details like how, when and by whom were data entered into the data bases.
These are all critical issues for the advance of any science, social system, economy, or political purpose, yet very few people are ever schooled in research methods that are essential to know how to do these things correctly.
One of the great failures of secondary or higher education, world-wide, is to ignore the need to understand how statistics are established and what data are needed for any given question. We remain locked in 19th century thinking with dependence upon anecdotal information or case studies, small parochial samples with no tests of generalizability, and the use of non-replicable research schemes to get quick & dirty answers to the questions of the day....and so we get quick and dirty answers that lead to decisions that fail to advance humanity. The press has lots of reason to worry about these matters, but no more than political figures who (unlike some national leaders today) actually seek the truth before jumping to conclusions.
How the data are published? How the data are collected? Who is responsible for data management?
Do You know the psychological mechanisms of violence?
Bad or ill persons ( lat. indultum in catolic church ) tended to acquire deviant patterns of processing social information, and these may mediate the development of aggressive behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVJAzTSFmk8
Data may, or may not, be peer-reviewed prior to publication. Governments are inconsistent regarding the protection or consistency of data collection, management and file maintenance.
Once in Accra, Ghana at the largest teaching hospital, over 12,000 medical records were fouled by an overflowing septic system and ruined. The same year my students discovered that over 5 years of national death certificates were NEVER entered into the mortality data base because the Ministry of Health eliminated the clerical position of the person who entered the data. I have dozens of other illustrations from many places, including the USA and UK.
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