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After acts of airline terrorism, air travel tends to drop dramatically--yet Americans routinely pursue the far riskier business of driving cards, where accidents resulting in death or injury are much more likely to occur. Reporting on Risk argues that this selective concern with danger is powerfully shaped by the media, whose coverage of potentially hazardous events is governed more by a need to excite the public than to inform it. Singer and Endreny survey a wide range of print and electronic media to provide an unprecedented look at how hundreds of different hazards are presented to the public--from toxic waste and food poisoning to cigarette smoking, from transportation accidents to famine, and from experimental surgery to communicable diseases. Their investigations raise thought-provoking questions about what the media tell us about modern risks, which hazards are covered and which ignored, and how the media determine when hazards should be considered risky. Are natural hazards reported differently than man-made hazards? Is greater emphasis placed on the potential benefits or the potential drawbacks of complex new technologies? Are journalists more concerned with reporting on unproven cures or informing the public about preventative measures? Do newspapers differ from magazines and television in their risk reporting practices? Reporting on Risk investigates how the media place blame for disasters, and looks at how the reporting of risks has changed in the past twenty-five years as such hazards as nuclear power, birth control methods, and industrial by-products have grown in national prominence. The authors demonstrate that the media often fail to report on risks until energized by the occurrence of some disastrous or dramatic event--the Union Carbide pesticide leak in Bhopal, the Challenger explosion, the outbreak of famine in Somalia, or the failed transplant of a baboon heart to "Baby Fae." Sustained attention to these hazards depends less on whether the underlying issues have been resolved than on whether they continue to unfold in newsworthy events. Reporting on Risk examines the accuracy and the amount of information we receive about our environment. It offers a critical perspective on how our perceptions of risk, as shaped by the media, may contribute to misguided individual and public choices for action and prevention in an increasingly complex world. The authors' probing assessment of how the media report a vast array of risks offers insights useful to journalists, policy analysts, risk specialists, legislators, and concerned citizens.

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CHOICE Review

Detailed statistics compare media news coverage of hazards and risks in 1960 and 1984. The book is filled with tables summarizing numbers and types of reports, column inches, air time, and percentages, and with statistical analysis. The goal is to determine how completely and accurately hazardous events in all parts of the world are presented and the degree to which the public is informed of accompanying risks. Newspaper, magazine, and television news coverage is compared as well as changes occurring between the sample years, 1960 and 1984. Though some of the findings are useful the study has a number of flaws. The data are derived from an arbitrary coding system that attempts to place all hazards in certain categories and to treat all media reporting as being identical in form. Thus, nuclear explosions are in the same hazard category as noise hazards. TV news is reduced to transcripts of the words spoken as though the visuals had nothing to do with the perception of hazard and risk. In addition, some samples are too small for reliable analysis. This study primarily provides numbers to substantiate what has long been known, and widely reported: It is journalistic practice to focus on shocking events and new threats rather than to report on ongoing issues that have been thoroughly investigated and supported with scientific data. Very little has changed. R. Cathcart; Queens College, CUNY

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

ELEANOR SINGER is senior research scholar at the Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University, and social science analyst with the U.S. Bureau of the Census. PHYLLIS M. ENDRENY is social research consultant in Chicago, and was previously assistant professor of mass communications and mass media at the University of Illinois at Chicago.