An Analysis of the Unequal Representation
The process news outlets go through to pick stories to report is actually quite complicated and shows pretty strong geographic and power-driven bias, in order to target the needs of the "average" viewer. Here are a few criteria that a story has to achieve to make it to national news.
A story about a hostage situation is more likely to be picked up by national media than a story about a lost puppy. A great example of this aspect lies in Case #7 about the school shooting. It didn't involve any major institutions and it didn't effect a considerable amount of people, but it still got on some news outlets because it was a very serious situation that had to be dealt with in an immediate manner.
How Serious the Situation is
Your location/country largely affects what news you are going to hear about. Cases #3 and #4 are good examples of this because they happened in different countries. In the "Level of Attention" category, I mentioned how these stories were picked up by local media outlets. This is because although these stories were not serious enough to be picked up nationally, people in those areas are still interested in the people/locations involved, thus giving local media outlets the job of giving their local news to them.
Location
Amount of People Affected
Of course, if a certain revelation affects tons of people, it is going to make it into the news. For example, in case #6 about the California wildfires, it only affects people that live in that area of the country. When you compare this to, fore example, news about a presidential election that affects everybody, it can easily be seen which one takes priority over another.
Popularity of Institutions Involved
This reason is huge for determining which stories get traction. For example, lets take a look at Case #1 and Case #2. These two stories are very similar, so the determining factor is which college they took place at. Obviously, Baruch College is much less well-known than Penn State, so more eyes are on Penn State to see how they are handling such a serious situation.
Although all news stories possess at least one of these elements, to become a national headliner, stories need to have multiple. These elements explain why we don't hear about the foreign stories in the US, and why we don't hear about scandals involving obscure, far-away companies. The underrepresentation in the news is a direct result of the media trying to give viewers material that is applicable to their lives. Yes, people do die around the world every day. We only hear about those that the media determines we want to hear about, those that will affect our lives and mindsets.
