People think that traveling in planes is far more dangerous than it really is, again because of TV. Airline crashes (not counting 9/11, which was deliberate) are thoroughly covered. The larger numbers of "routine" deaths in automobile accidents are not covered nationally.
The reason is the lack of resources in TV news. They have only a few crews, which are only assigned to the bloodiest, most horrifying and least common of events. Seeing only a selected fraction of reality on TV gives the viewers a false understanding of the truth.
The point of this article is not "death doesn't matter." It is that death comes in many forms, most commonly in ways that the national press does not bother to cover. Preventable heart attacks, strokes, and (sometimes preventable) cancer are the biggest killers of Americans. When was the last time you saw a major news story on any of those? But that's not a "man bites dog" kind of story.
Even when you see live coverage of a real event on TV, the press may still be lying to you. They lie to you by not including the context. They lie to you by leaving the reality of America on the cutting room floor as they live by the maxim, "If it bleeds, it leads."
Congressman Billybob