How Media Coverage Exaggerates Risks and Dangers
Commentary
By John Stossel
If you watch television news regularly, you can't help but think that the world is a very scary place.
You'll be hammered with a whole host of frightening stories about crime, terror threats, strange new diseases, or scary old ones. It's the media's job to inform us of these dangers, but does the amount of coverage reflect the risk we really face?
Remember last year's coverage of shark attacks? It seemed everywhere you looked someone in the press was talking about the "Summer of the Shark." You may have believed that shark attacks were on the rise. That's what some television stations reported. But it wasn't true.
Last year, shark attacks off American beaches were hardly different from previous years. Most of the reports mentioned that, but that important truth got lost amid the blare and blur of frightening headlines and images. While the media were busy scaring us out of the water, scientists said there was no increase in the number of sharks off our beaches and stressed that sharks were so unlikely to kill you that you're about 25 times more likely to be killed by lightning.
Revved-Up Road Hazards
If television isn't frightening you, then news magazines are ready to step in and fill that void. Newsweek, for example, claimed Americans were being "driven to destruction" by road rage. In their report, they quoted a study saying we were "increasingly being shot, stabbed, beaten and run over." Then television echoed with its own flurry of road-rage reports. On 20/20, ABCNEWS introduced a story by telling our viewers that they're surrounded by "strangers in their cars, ready to snap." We called road rage a frightening trend and a growing American danger.
The hype surrounding the reporting blew the real dangers out of proportion. Bob Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which studies media coverage and has concluded that the media often distort or exaggerate threats. He said, "If road rage is something that's increasing ? we should see more fatalities on the road. There should be more reports of reckless driving. But these things are going down instead of up."
A justification for the media hype surrounding road rage was a study sponsored by the American Automobile Association (AAA) that chronicled reports of aggressive driving. According to a Time magazine story, which based its information the AAA report, road rage was up 51 percent in the first half of the 1990s.
Stefanie Faul, a spokeswoman for the AAA, said the consumer group based its analysis mostly on the number of road rage and aggressive driving incidents reported in the press. It was a strange sort of circular logic that fueled the spiraling coverage of road rage. The AAA study looked at police reports as well, but was largely based on media accounts.
Lichter said people have been yelling at each other in their cars for years. Journalists just found a term for it. A few years back, Lichter noted, a person might come and complain that somebody yelled at them from his car. Today, people go home and say they're victims of "road rage."
AAA's Faul said that the idea of violent death by strangers is a very common topic in news reports. "You know that if you get people excited about an issue ? that's what makes it appealing as a topic." She also added that small organizations like hers can't take on huge media conglomerates. Still, she admits that she didn't make an effort to correct the mischaracterization she saw in the press.
And before there was road rage, there were carjackings. The media told us that carjackings were making a comeback on Americans streets in the '90s. Greg McCrary, of the Threat Assessment Group, which works to point out that life's real dangers are far less dramatic than what the media may lead you to believe, said the chance of being killed in a carjacking is infinitesimally small.
McCrary said the mundane things pose greater risks on the road ? things like drunken driving and failing to fasten our seat belts. Like Faul, McCrary said these sorts of things just aren't attention-grabbing. "It doesn't sell on TV. Sex and violence sells," he said.
Paved With Good Intentions
Lichter agrees with McCrary's assessment. His organization noted that press coverage of murders increased by 700 percent in the 1990s, but the murder rate had fallen by half during the decade. Lichter said, "It's easier to point a camera at a blood-stained wall where a victim has just been taken away, than it is to dig into a book of dull, dry statistics."
According to Lichter, when there's not a major news story that has some dramatic element to it, newspapers and television stations will ramp up their coverage of things like shark attacks and carjackings to keep us buying papers and tuning in. Lichter said, "Journalists unconsciously train themselves to look for the story that really rivets your attention. And that story is, 'Wow, here's a disaster, oh my God.'"
A few years ago, for example, there were as many shark attacks, but it wasn't a summer of the shark. Perhaps because the media were busy covering the election. Back in 1995 there were 46 shark attacks, but the spotlight was on O.J. Simpson's murder trial. In 1998, the Monica Lewinsky story kept the shark attacks in the shadows.
Lichter said that reporters may have the best of intentions when the pursue a story, but often they stir up problems that really aren't there. This, Lichter said, poses a real danger to the public. Lichter said, "Bad journalism is worse than no journalism, because it leaves people thinking they know something that is, in fact, wrong."