Media underplay technology hazards

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1996

The public commonly feels that the news media distort and exaggerate the perils of modern technology. However, research indicates that major newspapers, at least, do a fair job of covering oil spills, nuclear accidents, and airplane crashes.

"The common belief could not be more wrong," maintains William R. Freudenburg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and the lead author of the study. "Instead of blowing risk out of proportion, reporters may, in fact, be underplaying the dangers inherent to a technological world."

The researchers examined how risk is portrayed by the news media, utilizing a sampling of 128 "hazard events," as covered by The New York Times and several other major newspapers. A detailed analysis of factual summaries of articles portraying everything from handgun violence to environmental degradation showed that what apparently drives coverage are the magnitude and severity of an incident, not a presumed desire to sensationalize or use bad news to sell newspapers. "Contrary to our expectations, objective indicators of hazard--casualties and other damages--remain the only statistically significant predictors of the amount of media coverage."

That discovery was so surprising, Freudenburg says, that he was moved to perform an analysis of the full text of stories\as well as headlines and pictures. 'We thought the factual summaries may have been misleading and that we would uncover the sensationalism we all complain about in the full text version. What we found instead was that the full articles were less scary than the factual summaries."

The findings deflate assertions that the media harbor an anti-technology bias and practice "scare of the week" journalism. Yet, if "emotional sensationalism" is the exception, rather than the rule, in the mainstream media, how does Freudenburg explain the common conviction that the media exaggerate and distort the news of technological risk? When people think they see media bias, he points out, they may be looking through a social filter. "Those who are most strongly associated with a particular social group are also the most likely to express the opinion that the media are biased against that group in favor of others."

Another explanation is the tendency of people to remember vivid events as being more probable than the mundane occurrences of everyday life. For example, people often think drive-by shootings may be more common than slow death by lung cancer, when the statistics show just the oDoosite.