The Media's History Of Hyping Up Crises And Predicting We're All Going To Die [CHART]

Via data visualization guru David McCandless of London-based Information is Beautiful, here is a breathtaking chart showing how badly the media tends to overhype "crises" that end up going nowhere (h/t @finansakrobat).

It plots number of stories (left axis) against actual resulting deaths (horizontal axis) over time.

While it's a pretty harsh indictment of press hysteria, it's also rather reassuring that the various diseases we were told would imminently wipe us all out proved relatively harmless:

David McCandless/Information is Beautiful