[playpause]

These are murders of people. The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article. To say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders, just because you were personally interested in a number you couldn't find in the article, is crass.

[cornel_io]

No. These are murders of "people who do XYZ". If we looked at murders of people who play Fortnite from 5 years ago until now, we'd see a clear trend, for no reason other than the fact that the number of people who play Fortnite has ebbed and flowed.

I don't know anything about this particular situation, but your callous dismissal of this indisputably correct warning is wrong.

[playpause]

You are right, I missed that point.

[TeMPOraL]

I didn't say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders. I said, in my paragraph, that sensationalized articles in general (and note that I didn't say this one definitely is in this category) often don't report the base rate, because it would reveal they're reporting a non-story. And I said that to counter cenophor's objection to ArchieMaclean's question, by pointing out it's pretty much the first question one should be asking when discussing an article/report that doesn't provide that number.

> The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article.

It wasn't, at least not directly. The numbers I saw are:

- 227 activists killed in 2020, the titular record number

- 4 activits / week on average being killed since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015[0]

You can tease out some insight from deconstructing the average (e.g. the 2020 number is above the average), but not much really. Not enough to tell you whether something has changed about this situation.

Also, please don't assume people asking for more clarity and better data are ignoring the human life context of the story.

--

There seems to be an error in the reported context of that figure - Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, but signed in April 2016 and became effective from November 2016 - per - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement.

[playpause]

I was wrong, you were making a very important point that just went over my head (it was early in the morning for me). Sorry.