From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Anxious about an autumn of catastrophe, take a number.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The most deadly mass shooting in recent American history.

The deadliest mass shooting in American history.

As the hours ticked by Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, the media, in a vacuum of information

and understanding that so often accompanies tragedy, offered up-to-the-minute

reckonings of the Las Vegas death toll. 20, 50, 58, breathlessly watching every nudge upwards, like the

Pledge thermometer at a telethon.

It was 58 now up to 59 dead.

It's also more than the total amount killed in the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary

shootings combined.

In fact, Sunday night shooting in Las Vegas was deadlier than

the deadliest single day for Americans in the entire war in Afghanistan. That is all 16 years

worth. Okay, sickening fact noted. Look, there are reasons for such impulses. Once again, amid chaos,

hard facts seem so urgent and fetching. And obviously,

death tolls are a convenient shorthand for the enormity of tragic events. But they are also blunt,

misleading, and ripe for abuse. The South Vietnamese lost 216 kills, an enemy dead number 1827, second highest weekly figure this year.

In Vietnam, an entire war was fed with a weekly body count, not just dubious in its accounting,

but ruinous in its effect, suggesting a steady path to victory in a lost cause.

...