Policy toward any given hazard is developed through dialogues between risk assessment scientists and risk management decision makers, the latter often elected. Impinging on these two groups is citizen pressure generated by public interest activists. Connecting the public to a given hazard or disaster are the media. Media portrayal of a given hazard or disaster affects individual perceptions and agency reactions to a given situation or event, and a large body of critical literature has shown media performance in hazards and many other issues to be problematical.

Conventional print and broadcast media have been faulted for sensationalism. Sensationalized coverage can amplify public concern about minimal risks, obfuscate the nature of significant risks, or hamper efforts to respond to a disaster.

Equally troubling is evidence suggesting systematic biases in media coverage, which can lead to inequitable hazard mitigation or emergency response, recovery, and reconstruction activities. In the work of Eugenie Rovai, Susan Place, and myself, for example, the geography of print media attention to areas affected by the 1994 Northridge earthquake differed markedly from the spatial pattern of actual damages. Grossly overcovered communities were 61 percent non-Hispanic white with 1990 per capita incomes of $26,000. Grossly undercovered communities were 22 percent non-Hispanic white with $14,000 of per capita income. Angelenos' mental maps of the hardest-hit communities aligned with the media geography rather than the actual geography of damages. Worst of all, the undercovered communities were recovering significantly more slowly than the overcovered communities, an effect that showed some independence from race and income.

Media tendencies to sensationalism and to systematic bias have been tied to a variety of factors that act to filter events into news. Media circulation affects advertising and sales revenues and profits. The pressure to boost circulation can induce sensationalism.

Conventional print and broadcast media have seen drastic concentrations in ownership patterns over the last several decades. The costs of winning access to large audiences are now prohibitively large. There is concern that narrowing of media ownership can result in narrowing of the political and ideological range of opinions brought to bear on an issue or hazard with loss of context in a given disaster or hazardous situation.

Risk assessment scientists and public interest activists have frequently noted their frustration in getting their messages to the general public through traditional media. They cannot control the media, and the cost of producing and distributing their own information in forms they like to large audiences is far beyond their resources.

Of growing importance as a possible remedy is the use of Internet media in these discussions to generate awareness and political activism. These interactive media allow technical experts and activists to bypass media they do not control to get their messages out to relatively large audiences. E-mail, newsgroups, listservers, chats, and web pages are relatively inexpensive and all of these channels except the web are technically not very demanding.

A lot of my recent work has focussed on how the Internet has changed access to large audiences on the part of risk assessment scientists and lay activists. Before the advent of the Internet, risk assessors and activists alike could not get their messages out to large popular audiences unless reporters and editors became interested in the issues. Even if there were journalistic interest, there was no guarantee that the message wouldn't be garbled or simplified or jammed into a pre-set narrative style that didn't fit the situation, as any of you know who've had interactions with the media and been dismayed at how your statements came out. And, assuming journalistic interest, the geographical scope of coverage would depend on who became interested and that wouldn't necessarily dovetail with the geographical scope of the risk or the political entities with jurisdiction over it.

With the début of the World Wide Web, the Internet was transformed into a popular phenomenon. It experienced massive growth in usage after about 1994 or so, thanks to the web, and activists quickly made use of its various channels: the web, e-mail, listservers, newsgroups, and chatrooms. E-maiI in particular made it possible to harness the power of exponential expansion in audience. That is, I send out a message of some urgency to 25 of my friends online, some of whom become concerned enough to send it to a couple dozen of their friends online, who in turn send it to their pals. If the message contains a negative threat appeal, as many hazards issues do, people are more motivated to do something about it, and e-mail is a very easy way to do something -- just hit the forward button. Similar to straight e-mail but even more powerful in exponential expansion are such e-mail relatives as listservers and newsgroups.

Web pages can help disseminate messages, too, but their effectiveness is more limited, due to two constraining factors. First, designing a web page and uploading it to one's web account is more technically demanding than just forwarding an e-mail message. Second, web pages depend on an active audience. That is, a web page only gets hits if someone is actively searching for information on a topic related to that page or if someone stumbles into the page as they follow links in other pages. E-mail audiences, by contrast, are passive: We all get all sorts of e-mail from friends, listservers, and spammers by dint of opening our inboxes. And forwarding of messages that catch our eye is trivially easy -- we just hit the forward button and fill in or check off the addresses we wish to bless with our latest find.

The upshot of this is that activists have found they can go around the conventional print and broadcast media and circumvent the filters between events and news coverage. I have looked at three examples in which large controversies were generated by as few as one individual! (Figure) The political economy of the Anaheim Hills landslide was publicized far and wide by one deeply angry victim who had webmaster skills. Mike Davis' popularization of the Southern California chaparral fire hazard in his Ecology of Fear earned him a firestorm of controversy and character assassination from one Malibu realtor who made up a pseudonym and created a huge web page attacking Davis. One journalism professor and a tireless webmaster fan of his, together with another nine or ten individuals, created a controversy over the plutonium on the Cassini- Huygens mission that nearly stopped its launch and cost NASA a staggering amount of its science budget to defend. This last case is noteworthy, too, for the numbers and international scope of people online who became concerned about the issue and began to act in concert against it. In all three cases, conventional media picked up the story and publicized it to local, national, or international audiences, respectively, but only after the Internet-mediated controversy had begun to generate traditionally newsworthy events, such as City government attempts to close down the Anaheim Hills landslide site or large demonstrations at Cape Canaveral. With the Internet, activists are in a position to create their own news with nearly the efficiency of any media conglomerate. Perhaps risk assessment scientists could learn from activists and get their own messages interjected into the public debate about risks like these.

"Media and Hazards:
Different Constructions of Public Perception by
Conventional Media and the Internet"

Christine M. Rodrigue
Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840-1101
rodrigue@csulb.edu

Presentation to the "Media and Hazards" panel
Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles, March 2002

 

URLs in the controversies mentioned here:

Anaheim Hills landslide:
      http://anaheim-landslide.com

"Brady Westwater's" on Ecology of Fear and Mike Davis:
      http://www.coagula.com/mike_davis.html

Stop Cassini Newsletter:
      http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/cassini.htm

Maintained by Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue
First placed on the web: 03/21/02
Last revised: 03/21/02