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Re: risk and the media



At 10:54 AM 8/17/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>the media's goal is to SELL their story to the public.

This is an unfortunate side effect of having a free press in a free
enterprise economy: bad news is big business. News-related businesses must
turn a profit to survive and will, therefore, focus more on issues and
stories that help sell their product moreso than on those that don't sell
as well.

We are also suffering from an oversupply of reporters - I usually describe
it as a condition where we have more reporters than news, which leads to
competition not only to get stories but also to make the most out of a
story. The recent media feeding frenzy over the JFK, Jr accident is an
excellent example: a full day of live coverage of no information, live
on-camera speculation by hastily grabbed "experts," and video of flocks of
reporters at various places waiting for someone to throw them some data.

At the same time, we are also nearly out of journalists. The difference
between a reporter and a journalist is remarkable. A reporter takes
information that s/he finds, receives, etc and simply reports it. A
journalist asks questions about the information. A reporter is the best
resource to a special interest group, because the group can count on the
reporter to relay the information the group fed to the reporter.
Journalists have a habit of trying to verify facts. The problem of
journalism is that it takes time - while the journalist is verifying or
disproving the information, a reporter is on the air reporting, hence
"scooping" the journalist. And in the nanosecond nineties, what matters
most is who gets the story first, not who gets it right.

Industries that make use of processes or materials involving radiation are
easy targets for special interest groups that can feed incomplete or
incorrect information to reporters and count on dissemination of that
information. Perhaps we should work on talking to those reporters and show
them how they've been used by the special interest groups. The people I
know in the news media may or may not have opinions about radiation and its
potential hazards, but everyone of them dislikes the idea of being used to
further someone's personal ambitions.

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