Re: Negative Media Coverage

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 08:49 AM 6/5/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Nader likes to rehash and antagonize the public)... I 
>noted that he didn't seem to care too much about frayed wires running
through 
>gas tanks, or parts of planes falling off. The big issue was radioactive
material... 

I really believe this is the heart of the matter. Planes can blow up in the
sky, trains can pile into overpasses, but the fear-of-radiation advocates
get TV time to publicly worry they might get some on them! And that is
protrayed as harm enough to warrant challenging an airline pilot to prove
that no radioactive material will be on board. I hope they insist on zero
radioactivity, which means no passengers allowed either.

I find it amazing that modern society faces enormous numbers of complex
technical issues and has little interest in learning about them in detail,
but insists on passing judgement on whether the technology is safe,
environmentally acceptable, superior or inferior to other technologies,
etc. That's how people with no academic or professional credentials get to
be "experts" or "advocates" on nuclear power, automobile safety, solar
energy, etc.

I expect this will ellicit a contempuous response about all the woes of
nuclear power being the fault of its advocates for failing to "sell" its
worthiness. The people who have spent their careers designing, building,
and operating the power plants in this country that have kept the lights on
in all those radio, TV, and newspaper newsrooms are the unfortunate victims
of a few love-to-hate-radiation advocates and a press that finds big money
in bad news and can't make a dime of good news.

If you don't think the press has a controlling influence in what the public
learns, consider this scenario: if a tourist happens to catch on video tape
a mid-air collision of two commercial airliners and their crashing to
ground, and a TV news team gets tape of police stopping a robbery and a
subsequent shoot-out, both on the same day that scientists announce the
development of room temperature superconducters that will change living
conditions for all of humanity, guess which story they won't have time to
get on the air in a 30 minute broadcast on that busy news day?

Reality. It's incredibly easier to get press coverage of bad news than good
news, so bad news is the information that gets disseminated to the public.
Saying it's the fault of the people with the good news that their info
doesn't get distributed is simply condemning the victims.

---------
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu