The world has changed a lot in the past hundred years. People don't really die violent deaths at the hands of others much any more. Journalism has failed to keep up, and images like this show that very clearly.
I suspect the data from 50 or 150 years ago would be similarly distorted. "Old person dies of old person disease" does not make the news.
Also the idea that homicide rates were much higher a century ago is colored by media and entertainment. The graph on the second page of https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1435670/pdf/p... (PDF) shows homicide rates in the 1970s exceeding that of the prohibition era, which itself was a huge spike over pre-prohibition rates.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. News content, just like all other content, is tracked and analyzed for engagement.
Publishers want to create content that people want to engage with, and we see over and over again that people prefer content that elicits a reaction.
Also, news subscriptions are now seen as a luxury good and not an essential need. Who wants to pay $15/month for a report on how many people died of heart disease this month?
It might be worth paying to get good information free of "engagement farming". But even someone who does pay such a subscription, probably would not read it.
