This visualization is a timeline of global media scare stories. The media love to blow stories out of proportion to boost their own ratings, particularly when not much is really going on the news. Killer wasps barely registered on the scare scale, but killed 1,000 people worldwide, while swine flu nearly jumps off the chart but was only associated 702 deaths. Violent video games show up in the news regularly but we don’t know if anyone has been killed by them.
