Sudden, violent risks get much more coverage than chronic risks which are of equal consequence. Ecology became a matter of widespread public concern in 1969 with the dramatic Santa Barbara Channel-Union oil spill.1 Two decades later, even before the Exxon Valdez spill, the public's support for environmental protection seems to be stronger than ever.2 A clean environment has become an American value.3 Television, the public's major source of news, is partly responsible.4 No written words datelined Santa Barbara could compare with television's film images of helpless birds coated with oil struggling to survive. Television, the visual medium, is especially suited to present dramatic stories, the kind the public tends to recall.5 Seventy-three percent of Americans get environmental news from television, compared to 62% from newspapers, and only 37% from magazines, 21% from friends, and 12% from other sources.6 The same is true for health information. Fourteen percent of Americans get cancer prevention information from physicians; 60% get it from television.7 If television is partly responsible for public awareness of environmental and health problems, it may also be partly responsible for the public's confusion about the relative risk of different hazards. Government, corporate and environmental group representatives criticize television's tendency to concentrate on the visual and dramatic-that is, spectacular scenes, crises, conflicts, heroes and villains-and to ignore familiar but deadly health and environmental hazards.8 When the mass media cover environmental risk issues, they pay relatively little attention to the scientific degree of risk.9 Even the assumption that the most visual and dramatic risks are covered has been challenged. Based on analyses of earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, Adams found that the severity of natural disasters explained little about nightly television news coverage of those events. Cultural proximity (defined as the number of U.S. tourists visiting the country) was the strongest predictor of coverage.10 The thesis that the media prioritize places-for example, a small catastrophe in an important place is more important than a bigger one in an unimportant place-has been discussed by Boyer, Wilkins, and Bledsoe, Handberg, Maddox, Lenox and Long. Among the factors that may explain the prioritization of places, especially for television coverage, are the physical and financial realities of getting cameras and camera operators to the locations of news events. For example, monitoring studies conducted in the mid-1970s demonstrated that the New York television stations failed to provide adequate news coverage of neighboring New Jersey (as little as 1% to 3% of total coverage). Furthermore, the New York stations rarely covered New Jersey news events located more than an hour's driving time away from their studios, with the exception of state capitalbased government stories.12 On a more philosophical note, Zipfs principle of least effort argues the universality of minimizing distance in human endeavors.13 Researchers concerned about television coverage of the environment and of health and environmental risk have tended to focus on acute, spectacular and unusual events like the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, the Three-Mile Island nuclear event, the Mount St. Helens eruption, and the Tylenol poisonings.14 Only Singer and Endreny's analysis of a sample of hazard stories covered in 1960 and 1984 by television and other media included a wide variety of types of risk stories.15 This study identified every environmental risk story shown by ABC, CBS and NBC on their nightly news broadcasts during the 26-month period January 1984 through February 1986. It examines the extent to which the relative degree of risk affects coverage, compared to the availability of dramatic visual images (the stuff that television is made of) and the distance from the camera operator's starting point to the news event (which may be due to convenience or other factors). …
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Mar 1, 1993
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