Topic Split: Media Coverage of Sensationalistic Events

[opinionista]

This is the original post that led to the discusison:

Geez... I say take a chance in life. Don't be freaking out about everything. Spinach is better cooked anyways. When it comes to germs, this nation  is full of clean freaks. If they were consistent they'd be checking out restaurants like Ihop more closely... why anyone would want to eat there is beyond me.

Well, Giancarlo here got a point. I know this e-coli outbreak is probably a serious one, but come on it is not like you can't survive without Spinach. My meaning is that sometimes this kind of warning are over sensationalized by the press. Ok, eating spinach is truly dangerous now, and I bet most kids are probably jumping with joy. However, from what I have seen the FDA is simply making a warning to avoid more cases. This is not a life or death situation, as the press is making it look like. So far there have been 114 victims distributed in 21 states and only one has died, according to CDC. This hardly makes it a major a health disaster. More people die in car accidents each day. CNN is now talking about the spinach e-coli mystery when it's well known that e-coli outbreaks are associated with improper handling at the plant, in transport or at the retailer. It's also associated with the use of certain fertilizers. This sort of reminds me of The Chicken Little tale. "The sky is falling!, the sky is falling!"

Natali, I guess you and I just read that story very differently.

We certainly are. I just realized that I no longer think like a journalist! I'm not sure if this is good news. My dissertation is about this, well about disasters. Oh well, I hope i get it back to "normal" when I fiinish.

[serious crayons]

We certainly are. I just realized that I no longer think like a journalist! I'm not sure if this is good news. My dissertation is about this, well about disasters. Oh well, I hope i get it back to "normal" when I fiinish.

I'm sure you'll be fine. (And thinking like a journalist isn't always a good thing!  )

What is your dissertation about? Is it about the psychology of response to disasters, or about press coverage of disasters, or what? It sounds interesting.

On a plane a couple of years ago I sat next to a Greek psychologist whose area of expertise was the psychology of risk assessment -- the flawed ways that humans measure relative risks. I'd read a little bit about it before that, and I find it a really fascinating topic.

[nakymaton]

Speaking of media panic:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/52708: "Majority of Americans unprepared for Apocalypse"



(Yes, I know it's the Onion. )

[opinionista]

I'm sure you'll be fine. (And thinking like a journalist isn't always a good thing!  )

What is your dissertation about? Is it about the psychology of response to disasters, or about press coverage of disasters, or what? It sounds interesting.

On a plane a couple of years ago I sat next to a Greek psychologist whose area of expertise was the psychology of risk assessment -- the flawed ways that humans measure relative risks. I'd read a little bit about it before that, and I find it a really fascinating topic.

It's about press coverage of disasters. I'm dealing with one disaster in particular: The Prestige Oil Spill disaster, that caused a huge damage on the Spanish Northern West Coast. But my dissertation is not directly related to the risk itself, but more on the politics, but I have to include some information about the perception of risks in the press in theory section. I also have to understand the teories about it. It's complex but also interesting.

What that pyschologist told you about how people measure risk is a whole discipline associated with Social Psychologist. It is called The Social Perception of Risks. There's an important author Paul Slovic who has written interesting books and articles about this, which includes the role of the press in the shaping of social perception of risk.

[serious crayons]

What that pyschologist told you about people measure risk is a whole discipline associated with Social Psychologist.

One example of people overestimating risks that I think is particularly troubling is child safety. Exaggerated fears of risks to children has led to drastic changes in parenting habits and in the experience of childhood itself. This is one area where I definitely hold the media responsible.

Some of those changes are for the good, I'm sure, and nobody wants to put children in danger. But modern children are safer from accident or disease than at any time in human history, yet parents are probably more paranoid than ever.

[Giancarlo]

I don't understand your point, Giancarlo. The media constantly does stories about food poisoning and how to avoid it: how to cook hamburgers thoroughly, how to keep your kitchen counters sanitary, how to keep your food safe at picnics and so on.

What job are we supposed to let the FDA do? If it's recalling bags of spinach, why shouldn't the media report that? How are the reports interfering with that?

I don't think I understand your point, or your attempting to argue with me. You have to remove yourself from the pool of media sensationalism you have bought into, and look at things objectively. I am looking at things objectively. I don't need the media using their stupid little scare tactics to try to tell me what I should or shouldn't do. In fact most of those things are common sense, and are emphasized by companies who make products to clean kitchens. Additionally, on packets of beef and so on, there are labels telling that the product needs to be fully cooked. I don't need the damn media tell me what to do. I am not stupid, and I don't believe most people are.

The media is sensationalist and people like you encourage that. The media should do a small segment on it advising people that the government has issued a warning, and go to more important things. I think this is dangerous and disgusting. I think the media is doing this to get people scared, and they are in it for the money. And no offense, the media is screwing over farmers and hurting small businesses. Now that's disgusting and quite vile.

The paranoia in this thread and American society (and media) sickens me. Take a chance in life. I took a chance visiting North Africa a few years back... life is not without chance or possible injury. The media has the tendency of telling us we should live in bubble worlds...

[opinionista]

One example of people overestimating risks that I think is particularly troubling is child safety. Exaggerated fears of risks to children has led to drastic changes in parenting habits and in the experience of childhood itself. This is one area where I definitely hold the media responsible.

Some of those changes are for the good, I'm sure, and nobody wants to put children in danger. But modern children are safer from accident or disease than at any time in human history, yet parents are probably more paranoid than ever.

Yeah I agree with you. Child safety is something some people are going overboard with, and the press is partly to blame. All those stories about child abduction, for example, is scaring off some parents and as a result some children can't even go to the park.

I'm not sure if this is relevant but your comment reminded me of a cousin whose daughter suffers from alopecia. The girl is 7 years old and is completely bald. To make matters worse, she's on a steroid based medicine treatment, and as a result she has gained weight considerably. My cousin told me that her mother (my aunt), was pressuring her into quiting her job so she would stay home to educate the girl instead of sending her to a regular public school. My aunt feared she was going to be subjected to bullying, was going to suffer and be emotionally scarred for the rest of her life.

But my cousin refused because she thought her daughter needed to learn how to defend herself. She didn't think hiding out in home was the answer. So, she told her daughter to stand up in front of her class and give a presentation to her classmates explaining what was wrong with her so the other kids wouldn't be afraid around her for her funny looks. She did it and it worked. The girl does get bullied sometimes, but she knows how to defend herself, and has a lot of friends who support her. And I think that is a positive way to teach a child, because life is hard and they need to learn how to face it IMO.

[serious crayons]

I don't think I understand your point, or your attempting to argue with me. You have to remove yourself from the pool of media sensationalism you have bought into, and look at things objectively. I am looking at things objectively. I don't need the media using their stupid little scare tactics to try to tell me what I should or shouldn't do. In fact most of those things are common sense, and are emphasized by companies who make products to clean kitchens. Additionally, on packets of beef and so on, there are labels telling that the product needs to be fully cooked. I don't need the damn media tell me what to do. I am not stupid, and I don't believe most people are.

The media is sensationalist and people like you encourage that. The media should do a small segment on it advising people that the government has issued a warning, and go to more important things. I think this is dangerous and disgusting. I think the media is doing this to get people scared, and they are in it for the money. And no offense, the media is screwing over farmers and hurting small businesses. Now that's disgusting and quite vile.

The paranoia in this thread and American society (and media) sickens me. Take a chance in life. I took a chance visiting North Africa a few years back... life is not without chance or possible injury. The media has the tendency of telling us we should live in bubble worlds...

OK, Giancarlo! Sounds like you have strong opinions about this, and you're already pretty comfortable with your views. To be honest, I'm not not quite interested enough in this topic to keep debating these points with you, especially when the conversation reaches this level of intensity. So to each his/her own. Have a great weekend!

[Giancarlo]

OK, Giancarlo! Sounds like you have strong opinions about this, and you're already pretty comfortable with your views. To be honest, I'm not not quite interested enough in this topic to keep debating these points with you, especially when the conversation reaches this level of intensity. So to each his/her own. Have a great weekend!

My increasing dislike for the media mainly comes with my major in political science and the fact that I have to listen to what these people say often. I'm not backing down from the fact the media is overly sensational and exaggerate numerous things.

I may have come off strongly, perhaps too strongly. Sorry for that.

[injest]

My dislike for the media is coming from corresponding with people in other countries and finding out how much we are lied to ...

[serious crayons]

What replaces it is an endless supply of  ...  missing pretty blonde white women

These stories are very sad, and it's very scary that so many pretty blonde white women have disappeared.

However, I take some comfort in the fact that people who are male, non-white, non-blonde, average looking and/or over age 23 apparently never go missing! What are those people doing to protect themselves so successfully? Maybe they could offer some safety tips to the pretty-blonde-white-young-female community.

 

[opinionista]

These stories are very sad, and it's very scary that so many pretty blonde white women have disappeared.

However, I take some comfort in the fact that people who are male, non-white, non-blonde, average looking and/or over age 23 apparently never go missing! What are those people doing to protect themselves so successfully? Maybe they could offer some safety tips to the pretty-blonde-white-young-female community.

 

It reminds me of the case of Natalee Holloway, the high school graduate who went missing in Aruba. It was all over the place. And I was always wondering if the case became big news just because she was, according to the news itself, a nice, sweet, perfect and all good blond american girl who disappeared in little a foreign country nobody knows about, with an obscure justice system. Curiously enough, around the same time another girl, hispanic I believe, went missing in some state (can't remember) and that case barely made the news.

[serious crayons]

I think there have been a couple of cases of girls disappearing who were young, white, pretty -- and dark-haired. But they're rare.

[delalluvia]

It reminds me of the case of Natalee Holloway, the high school graduate who went missing in Aruba. It was all over the place. And I was always wondering if the case became big news just because she was, according to the news itself, a nice, sweet, perfect and all good blond american girl who disappeared in little a foreign country nobody knows about, with an obscure justice system. Curiously enough, around the same time another girl, hispanic I believe, went missing in some state (can't remember) and that case barely made the news.

Natalee's predicatment was all over the news.  I assumed that was because things were slow in Iraq.   

News agencies are not for non-profit.  They have investors and survive on advertising.  What sells is good.  Stories of young, kinda-sorta-pretty, blond white college girls who disappear on little islands considered 'safe' because they're where many people go to vacation is news.

A hispanic girl who disappears close to home who may or may not have tons of ex-boyfriends, bad-tempered husbands, relatives, psycho neighbors or inlaws and/or stalkers in her life is not news.

People are killed mostly by their friends/family/loved ones.

People who are killed by strangers in a faraway exotic places where people go to vacation, let down their hair and have a fun time is news.

People who are killed by cancer or cars is not news.  Thousands if not hundreds of thousands die this way every year.  People who get killed in unusual circumstances - planes, spinach, WTC, etc, even though the number is much smaller - IS news, simply because of the dramatic rarity.

[Phillip Dampier]

It reminds me of the case of Natalee Holloway, the high school graduate who went missing in Aruba. It was all over the place. And I was always wondering if the case became big news just because she was, according to the news itself, a nice, sweet, perfect and all good blond american girl who disappeared in little a foreign country nobody knows about, with an obscure justice system. Curiously enough, around the same time another girl, hispanic I believe, went missing in some state (can't remember) and that case barely made the news.

Holloway gave great cat fights between Rita Sucrets Cosby on MSNBC and Greta who "owned the story" on Fox News.  Night after night, day after day.  Then mom went down and decided to help the Arubans out with their justice system, managing to insult the Dutch territory and its citizens as backwater no-nothings.  After one of the millions of press conference, after one of mom's more vocal tirades, a woman speaking in Dutch outside called Natalee a "slut girl from the states" who came down here, decided to party too much, disappeared, and now this "trailer trash mom from Alabama who can't teach her own children common sense values wants to come down here and tell us poor island folk how to run the place?"

Because the best way to solve a crime is to antagonize the local police force, the Arubans, and get camera elbowing elected American officials into the mix threatening boycotts.

Then Dr. Phil had to add his two cents about how she was kidnapped by a Venezuelan white slavery ring.

Spare us.

[nakymaton]

Can I put in a plug for my favorite news source, National Public Radio (www.npr.org, for people outside the US)? I don't get any television stations, so I get my news by listening to NPR while driving to and from work. And it doesn't hype the disappearance of young white blondes, and the discussion of the spinach scare has included both short pieces explaining what's happened and where, and longer pieces discussing the impact of the bans on farms in California.

I love NPR. It's thought-provoking, it's interesting, it feeds my curiosity about the world without leaving me with this sense of ever-present, ever-changing danger that I get from five minutes of CNN/MSNBC/Fox, or from the network news programs.

Oh, and the morning program has movie reviews from Kenneth Turan, who was my favorite movie critic even before he criticized last year's Oscars.

And before I transform into the electronic equivalent of a fund drive, I'll get out of here.

[serious crayons]

People who are killed by cancer or cars is not news.  Thousands if not hundreds of thousands die this way every year.  People who get killed in unusual circumstances - planes, spinach, WTC, etc, even though the number is much smaller - IS news, simply because of the dramatic rarity.

Right, Del. That is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier regarding spinach.

And I agree that the vacation-sland angle made the Natalee story more newsy. But many of those blonde white girls who've gone missing over the years weren't in Aruba, and some nonwhite girls probably disappear while on vacation. I think there is a tendency for journalists to assume that the disappearances of white girls are shocking and those of nonwhite girls are easily explainable and/or routine.

When I was a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, a city that is two-thirds black, I saw that phenomenon a lot. It's probably not usually deliberate or even conscious, to give the benefit of the doubt, but it happens.

[Giancarlo]

Right, Del. That is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier regarding spinach.

And I agree that the vacation-sland angle made the Natalee story more newsy. But many of those blonde white girls who've gone missing over the years weren't in Aruba, and some nonwhite girls probably disappear while on vacation. I think there is a tendency for journalists to assume that the disappearances of white girls are shocking and those of nonwhite girls are easily explainable and/or routine.

When I was a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, a city that is two-thirds black, I saw that phenomenon a lot. It's probably not usually deliberate or even conscious, to give the benefit of the doubt, but it happens.

I still strongly disagree with you on several factors. I didn't say "don't report this". I'm saying don't make a big media circus out of it because it clearly isn't.

[Phillip Dampier]

Can I put in a plug for my favorite news source, National Public Radio (www.npr.org, for people outside the US)? I don't get any television stations, so I get my news by listening to NPR while driving to and from work. And it doesn't hype the disappearance of young white blondes, and the discussion of the spinach scare has included both short pieces explaining what's happened and where, and longer pieces discussing the impact of the bans on farms in California.

For those unaware, NPR is probably the closest thing we have to an ABC in Australia, BBC in the UK, RTE in Ireland, CBC in Canada, NOS in the Netherlands, NRK in Norway, Deutschlandfunk in Germany, SR in Sweden, etc.  In short, it's not state radio but public radio and television.  It is a private corporation not associated with the government. A great many of their programs are available for podcast, download, live listening, etc.

Unfortunately, the external services of the United States government, such as the Voice of America have been under assault since the Bush Administration came to power and installed Kenneth Tomlinson (who also wormed his way into the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for awhile) who is now under investigation for corruption.  Tomlinson is a proponent of using government broadcasting in the "war on terror" which is shorthand for propaganda.  No one is more upset about this than VOA employees themselves who have relied on a firewall between government and broadcasting since VOA's inception in 1942.  VOA and the now many surrogate radio outlets coordinated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (Radio Free Asia, Europe, Liberty + Radio Farda, Radio/TV Marti, etc.) simply don't have the prestige of the BBC any longer.

But perhaps it is time to split this into its own thread....

[serious crayons]

I still strongly disagree with you on several factors. I didn't say "don't report this". I'm saying don't make a big media circus out of it because it clearly isn't.

I'm sorry, Giancarlo, but I don't understand what your point is here. If you're still talking about sensationalizing spinach, fine, whatever. If you're talking about missing girls, then I'm not sure we even disagree.

[Giancarlo]

I'm sorry, Giancarlo, but I don't understand what your point is here. If you're still talking about sensationalizing spinach, fine, whatever. If you're talking about missing girls, then I'm not sure we even disagree.

You are the one who chose to take up the issue with me. I almost want to ask why you even started arguing with me. The Aruba case was turned into a media circus. If I were the parents I would be quite angry because it interferes with the investigation.

[serious crayons]

But again, what are we talking about? If it's spinach, then fine, maybe I did start the argument, in which case I'm hereby officially backing out. If it's Natalee's disappearance, again, I don't think we disagree, do we?!

[Giancarlo]

But again, what are we talking about? If it's spinach, then fine, maybe I did start the argument, in which case I'm hereby officially backing out. If it's Natalee's disappearance, again, I don't think we disagree, do we?!

Actually I think we do. I think the Natalee Hollyway case did become a media circus, and the investigation was possibly damaged by the media.

[serious crayons]

Actually I think we do. I think the Natalee Hollyway case did become a media circus, and the investigation was possibly damaged by the media.

Then we don't. I was criticizing the media's coverage of that story. My criticism focused on different objections, but I don't dispute yours.

[Kelda]

Its like the Austrian girl Natascha Kampusch who was kidnapped and kept by her captor for about 8 years. when she escaped about 5 weeks ago it was HUGE story and now I don't even know whats happened to her. Media drops storys like hot potatoes when its not the big news anymore.