Risk assessment science and risk management policy ideally inform one another regarding natural and technological hazards. Impinging on their relationship is citizen pressure generated by public interest activists and the often distorting print and broadcast media. Media portrayal of a given hazard or disaster affects individual perceptions and agency reactions to a given situation or event, and media performance in hazards and many other issues is problematical.

Sensationalized coverage can:

• amplify public concern about minimal risks
• attenuate concern about significant risks
• hamper efforts to respond to a disaster
• reduce social emphasis on mitigation

Media, then, may partly explain the often-noted differences in risk perception between risk assessment scientists and the lay public. The media may play to and enhance cultural predispositions to exaggerate certain hazards and deny others.

Risk assessment scientists, risk management policy makers, and lay activists have frequently voiced their frustration in getting their messages to the general public through traditional media. Of growing importance as a possible remedy is the use of Internet media 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, Usenet, listservers, chats, and web pages are relatively inexpensive. The Internet also enables the exponential expansion of communication through the chain-mail dynamics of the forward button. For the first time, ordinary citizens and risk assessment scientists have the means to communicate their messages to large audiences. How might this potential depolarization of power in communication affect perception of and behavior towards a hazard?

This paper traces the impact of the Internet on two very different dialogues about risk assessment and risk policy. In one case, the Internet was used to generate enormous public concern and pressure over a hazard deemed trivial by conventional risk assessment; in the latter, the Internet was used to debunk a hazard viewed as substantial and socially inequitable by the professional risk assessment community.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan became controversial as a result of NASA's decision to use ceramicized plutonium-238 dioxide both to generate electrical power for the instruments and to keep them at operating temperature 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun. Adding to the controversy was the trajectory that would be used to get Cassini from Earth to Saturn, which entailed a gravity assist around Earth in August of 1999.

The movement to abort the launch and, later, the Earth swingby did not stop either event. It did generate a lot of controversy and pressure on Congress, however, which may affect the design, authorization, and funding of future missions to the outer solar system.

Besides a number of print media and television pieces on the controversy, most activism took place via e-mail, listservers, and Usenet, as well as the Web. Concentrating on Usenet, I went through the messages posted on "Cassini" from April 1995 through March 1999 and developed a sample of 937 authors of 8,020 messages on the controversy. Sixty percent were supporters, 21% opponents, and 20% were neutral.

Twenty-four percent of the opponents who contested the risk assessment done for NASA simply passed on messages originating from others. I tracked the sources of the forwarded messages to about a half dozen individuals! The Cassini controversy thus demonstrates the empowerment the Internet offers to individual activists. A handful of people can alert others to an issue of concern and enlist them to spread the news. The population passively receiving these notices expands exponentially and, even if a small percentage of those exposed to the idea responds politically, the result can be tremendous political pressure.

Potentially very empowering to ordinary citizens, then, Internet communication also offers opportunity for demagoguery through the social amplification of risk. New media make it possible for a handful of people to mobilize a politically potent movement over hazards deemed trivial in probability and minor in consequence by conventional risk assessment.

Chaparral is fire-dependent scrub vegetation in many mountainous areas of California. The longer the period since a fire, the greater both the probability and the magnitude of the next fire. Residential construction and occupation in such a fire-dependent vegetation system necessarily creates a natural hazard and occasional disaster.

While the benefits of hillside homes with views are narrowly privatized, the costs are socialized through fire-fighting taxes and a mandatory fire insurance assigned risk pool in California. The result is a hidden upward income transfer in the form of a social subsidy to wealthier households with the resources to act on the environmentally dysfunctional preference for buying homes with a view.

Appreciated for decades by scientists and the insurance industry in California, this situation became more widely known when Mike Davis, a caustic observer of Los Angeles, began to publicize the wildfire hazard, notably in a chapter in his The Ecology of Fear.

A media firestorm erupted over the book in October 1998. Leading the charge against Davis was one Brady Westwater, who began the controversy by posting a large web page accusing Davis of "error, deception and mistakes" in his research. Westwater then argued that residential development reduces fire hazard in Malibu. "Brady Westwater" turns out to be the pseudonym for a realtor in Malibu, whose living depends on selling those structures in the chaparral.

The "Westwater" web page then became the basis for print media attacks by L.A. boosters. The story was picked up in national and international print and web- based media and the L.A. Times. Lost in the invective, however, has been any sense of the risk to which wealthy home buyers in the montane suburbs of California are subjecting themselves, their families, and their prized possessions, and the social inequities involved in paying for their inevitable losses.

This controversy again highlights the empowerment of private individuals by the Internet, in this case, the web. An individual negatively impacted by Davis' message of chaparral fire hazard in Malibu launched a web campaign to obscure the basically positive professional view of Davis' central message. "Westwater" reached a few key individuals in the popular print and Internet media, who, in turn, attenuated the sense of chaparral fire hazard aroused by Mike Davis by "shooting the messenger."

These two cases illustrate both the social amplification of risk (Cassini) and the social attenuation of risk (chaparral fire) through a new communications outlet. Traditional print and broadcast media strongly affect the construction of hazard and disaster perceptions, often in unfortunate ways. They have their own goals, which often depend on sensation, framing an issue in terms of human drama and confrontation, and biasing coverage to enhance appeal to targeted market segments. These goals do not necessarily coincide with the information dissemination needs of emergency managers, planners, risk assessment experts, and activists or the information needs of potential or actual victims. Until recently, the quirks and needs of media have just been part of the sorry facts of life for experts, activists, and the lay public.

The Internet is rapidly changing everything. The low cost of entry into Internet communication enables the circumvention of media priorities and filters in coverage . . . and of professional peer review, too. This kind of communication enables relatively easy recruitment of activists and thus generates a lot of political pressure on the already inherently political process of hazard management.

Hazard management policy is normally partly informed by risk assessment science, despite its own irreducibly political nature. Hazard management policy must strike a balance between failing to respond to a truly serious risk or imposing undue opportunity costs to minimize a trivial hazard. Impinging on this process in a democratic society are the public's concerns and perceptions of a hazard.

If the risk is amplified through the media or other social processes, risk management policymakers may be forced to minimize trivial risks and exact opportunity costs. Similarly, if the risk is attenuated in public perception, policymakers may be forced to de-emphasize dealing with a serious and costly hazard for want of public support.

These two case studies underscore the power of the new Internet media to inflate concern over minor hazards and dull concern over serious ones. Risk assessment science and risk management policy have an even more complicated relationship now. More attention must be paid to public perceptions and preferences, which enhances democratic functioning, but, simultaneously, more skepticism must be directed towards perceptions and preferences that may be amplified or attenuated and coördinated with scarcely any effort.

Illustrations

• Assessment of Chaparral Fire Risk in Southern California
  • Fire Incident Frequency, Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, 1900-present

  • Age of Vegetation, Los Angeles and Ventura Counties: Fire Risk Goes up Directly with Age

• Assessment of Risks Posed by Cassini-Huygens Mission
  • Table 2-2, NASA Final Supplemental Environmental Assessment

• Example of Anti-Cassini Activist Web Site
  • Stop Cassini

Abstract:
Published in Conference Proceedings, p. PS01-21

The advent of the Internet has fundamentally altered the dialogue between risk assessment science and risk management policy. This dialogue has always been highly politicized, with pressure brought to bear on it from various stakeholders. These actively interested stakeholders have often included the public, which exhibits varying levels of activity. The effectiveness of public input has also varied, depending on perception, commitment of a vanguard of the more activist, and the sophistication of the latter in snagging media coverage to propagate their perceptions and activate wider participation among the rest of the public.

All the players in a given hazardous situation depend on broadcast and print media to get their messages out to one another and to the general public. The problem for them is that they cannot control the representation of their messages in the media. The media have their own interests and needs, which do not necessarily dovetail with the communications needs of risk assessment scientists, risk management policymakers, emergency responders, activists, and the broader public.

The Internet changes everything. This new, highly interactive medium brings immediacy, duration, geographical reach, and exponential expansion of communications among individuals -- and all for a very small price. Mass communication is now in the hands of the masses. What does this mean for the hazards community and the varyingly active members of the public?

Early results have included an impressive empowerment of individual activists as a handful of them generate tremendous citizen pressure on risk management decision makers. This is a blade that cuts both ways, however, with the Internet introducing new opportunities for demagoguery and for hijacking the reference group trust by which most people make political decisions on issues far beyond their normal concerns. The consequences include the propagation of skewed perceptions of hazard, and the resulting misdirection of behavior towards it.

That is, the Internet heightens efficiency in the social amplification of risk and the social attenuation of risk. That is, the Internet has been used to amplify public concern about a risk assessed with conventional methods as vanishingly tiny in probability and relatively trivial in consequences (the use of plutonium dioxide on the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft). It has also been used to blunt perceptions of a natural hazard with relatively high and temporally increasing risks of recurrence and magnitude (chaparral fire hazard in Southern California).

Risk amplification in the first case may result in the opportunity costs of knowledge about the outer solar system forgone and of diverted political energies. Risk attenuation in the second case encourages more people to seek view homes in the middle of pyrogenic vegetation, thereby putting themselves at risk and diverting social protection resources to an unnecessary hazard.

More information about these and related projects can be found at: https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/research.html

document maintained by author
© Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D., 2001
first placed on the web: 07/20/01
last revised: 07/20/01