Media, Hazards, and Disasters

Media are a large influence on how the public perceives hazard, the probability of disaster, an unfolding crisis, and what should be done during an emergency.

• They may be a large factor in public risk amplification or attenuation, and new electronic media may accelerate this distorting rôle.
• Several of my own research projects have explored media performance in one or another hazard or disaster situation.

So, this lecture will take up literature on media influence on perception, some reasons for their quirks, and consider some variations in different kinds of media. The upshot is pretty depressing, but understanding the media can help disaster planners and emergency managers anticipate and perhaps get ahead of the problems they pose and exploit the opportunities they present for public education

One theme in this literature is the sensationalism many media bring to hazards and disaster coverage, which can amplify public concern inappropriately or even hamper efforts to respond to a disaster. Firefighting crews are familiar with disaster "lookie-loos" (and media crews can logistically be almost as much trouble as the disaster sightseers their coverage attracts).

• A classic article linking media sensationalism to distortions in public perception of risk is Kasperson, Roger E.; Renn, Ortwin; Slovic, Paul; Brown, Halina S.; Emel, Jacque; Goble, Robert; Kasperson, Jeanne X.; and Ratik, Samuel. 1988. The social amplification of risk: A conceptual framework. Risk Analysis 8: 177-187.

• "If it bleeds, it leads" -- an adage that captures the essence of media. To be fair, "news" is about something unusual, a departure from the ordinary and everyday pattern of activities, and something really frightening or angering or disgusting can, thus, generate a newsworthy story. This is a principle that fits a lot of entertainment, such as movies and TV shows. They are built around how witnessing the unusual/awful brings out voyeurism and attention, whether it's slowing to gawk at an accident on the other side of the road or what we choose to read, view, or listen to.

• As if media sensationalism wasn't bad enough, people are perfectly capable of exaggerating and embellishing a story as they relate it to friends and family and now all their "friends" online (think of the party game, Telephone), which leads to sensational rumors, the bane of disaster management

  • There were all kinds of stories passed by word of mouth about how the Northridge earthquake was "really" a 9.0 quake on the "Richter" scale but FEMA wasn't telling us because that would mean they'd have to pay everyone's damages (???)

  • The Iben Browning predictions that there would be another New Madrid earthquake on December 2-3, 1990, because of heightened lunar gravitational attraction, set off a panic in the Midwest (which is actually at risk to earthquakes but doesn't generally have seismically resistant construction). Looking on the bright side, this episode did trigger a serious discussion about Midwestern earthquake mitigation. Here's an interesting book about that episode: Farley, John E. 1998. Earthquake Fears, Predictions, and Preparations in Mid-America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

  • There was quite a hoopla in Naples, Italy, over a National Geographic article on Vesuvius' long history of eruptions and a prehistoric eruption of greater magnitude than the famous Pompeii incident. The story evolved in the retelling into a "prediction" of an "imminent" eruption and that people should evacuate immediately, creating a massive headache for local civil authorities, who creatively got ahead of the snowballing rumor through use of social networking messages!

    • Here's the original story: Hall, Stephen S. 2007. Vesuvius countdown. National Geographic (September), available at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/09/vesuvius/vesuvius-text

    • Here is an analysis of how emergency managers got ahead of the rumors and risk amplification using social media: Paradiso, Maria. 2012. Information and communication technologies and environmental safety: The case of Naples-Vesuvius, Italy. Journal of Urban Technology 19, 4: 45-59.

  Sometimes, however, the media do not dramatize a hazard before the event, thus attenuating public perception of a situation to which they may be at risk. Probably the classic example of this is wildfire hazard in the Wildfire-Urban Interface (WUI).

  • Mike Davis published an "inflammatory" chapter, entitled "The case for letting Malibu burn" in his 1998 book, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, pp. 95-147).

  • This was followed very quickly by an ad hominem attack on his character by a Malibu realtor, Ross Ernest Shockley, who created a web page under a pseudonym, Barry Westwater, describing himself as a local historian. "Westwater" claimed that the intensification of settlement in the WUI would actually lead to a reduction in wildfire hazard, by reducing vegetation, creating a need for better roads, and new construction to newer and better standards.

  • The story then was picked up by a former real estate executive, David Friedman, writing in the L.A. Downtown News, which then was picked up by Jill Stewart in the (now extinct) L.A. New Times, which was then picked up by British media, which eventually led the L.A. Times to cover it.

  • Mike told me he'd gotten telephoned death threats at his home as a result. This sort of intimidation has become vastly more common in the Internet Age with the advent of "trolls" who write insanely venomous things on comments pages, Twitter, contact pages, and e-mails in response to pretty much anything these days. The seeming anonymity of online discourse apparently liberates antisocial impulses in some individuals from the self-policing needed in less anonymous settings. Trolling sometimes escalates into "doxxing" or tracking down and publicizing targets' (and their children's and other family members') physical locations, which can create a dangerous situation. This behavior can create other, less obviously negative consequences, not the least of which is self-censoring by authors concerned about their safety or that of their families. Davis' experience is hardly unique:
    • Climate change science
    • A pro-GMO scientist

  • As for Mike Davis, never mind that biogeographers, ecologists, and the fire hazard community pretty much agree with most of his points and have been writing professional pieces about it for decades: His experience, no doubt, will make others think twice about writing popular pieces about the WUI risk! There's a lot of money at stake.

  Some effort has gone into assessing the accuracy of media reportage of hazards or disasters, for example, by comparing media coverage with "objective" measures of danger or damage.

  • Scanlon et al. did a project along these lines in 1978. They re-investigated six stories about a murder, three natural disasters, and two human-set fires and compared the facts they gleaned from official sources with the contemporary reportage. They concluded that the media do better than the lay public perceives in getting the gist of a story across but often uncritically report wrong, confusing, and even contradictory details. Scanlon, T. Joseph; Luuko, Rudy; and Morton, Gerald. 1978. Media coverage of crises: Better than reported, worse than necessary. Journalism Quarterly 55, 1: 68-72.

  • Eugenie Rovai's, Susan Place's, and my work on the Northridge earthquake fell into this category:

    • We compared red- and yellow-tagged buildings (grouped into Zip codes and the Zip codes aggregated into the named communities of Los Angeles, such as Northridge, Crenshaw, Hollywood, and so forth)

    • We used a simple linear regression and the damage geography did account for about a third of the variation in media attention

    • We then looked at the residuals, or departures above and below the regression line. You can't reasonably expect there to be a perfect correlation between media and damages, so we only focussed on the largest departures

    • The weighted mean per capita income in the LA Times overcovered communities was $26,314 (in 1990 dollars) and $11,130 in the undercovered communities

    • The disparities were similar but less extreme in La Opinión. ($18,629 vs. $13,003, respectively)

    • The communities overcovered by the Times were 63% non-Hispanic white, while those undercovered by the Times were 20% non- Hispanic white

    • La Opinión showed a similar, if not so extreme disparity: 55% non-Hispanic white in overcovered communities, vs. 23% in undercovered communities

    • Some of this work was presented in Rovai, Eugenie, and Rodrigue, Christine M. 1998. The "Northridge" and "Ferndale" earthquakes: Spatial inequities in media attention and recovery. National Social Science Journal 11, 2: 109-120. Available at https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/nssajournal.html.

Some risk communication literature states that such comparisons might be a little unfair. The argument is that the media are not there faithfully to reproduce in print, radio, or images the exact probabilities or estimates approved by experts. Rather, they are to provide helpful information for people to evaluate and reduce their risk. Their rôle, then, might be or even should be less reportage than mass communication and public education.

• Alan Mazur made this argument in his 1998 book, A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press).

• In emergency situations, Quarantelli characterizes this function as mass communication, which takes in more than simple reportage of facts and theories and education about risks.

  • A classic piece is Quarantelli, E.L. 1990. A preliminary statement on the different worlds of science and mass communication: Implications for information flow between them. University of Delaware Disaster Research Center Preliminary Paper 151. Available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.510.5524&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

  • A newer piece that compares and contrasts disaster coverage with terrorism coverage is Quarantelli, E.L. 2002. The role of the mass communication system in natural and technological disasters and possible extrapolation to terrorism situations. Risk Management 4, 4: 7-21.

  • Quarantelli's view of the mass communication function in a disaster includes:

    • news about immediate events in a disaster

    • information pertinent to disaster planning at all levels

    • education about disaster behavior and what to do

    • project imagery about disasters that can engage the viewers' emotions

• Others concerned with the mass media functions argue that they are to report on possible breakdowns in institutional protections for people, and, most importantly, they are to provide a public forum or arena for debate on issues that might not be well encompassed by official statistics. A classic anthology containing pieces making one or another form of this argument is Walters, Lynn Masel; Wilkins, Lee; and Walters, Tim (eds.). 1989. Bad Tidings: Media and Catastrophe (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). In many ways, blogs, Facebook postings, TikTok videos, comments on web pages, Twitter, and e-mails have become this public forum and debate arena.

There is a large body of literature, both professional and popular, that critiques media in general, but which may be specifically applicable to the hazards and disaster context. It identifies various filters that operate to bias media selection of newsworthy events from the chaos of everyday events.

• Some of these filters are internal to the culture of media professionals

  • Media attempt to simplify complex situations, which is a valuable service to the time-stressed and the non-expert, but simplification can sometimes damage public understanding of a complicated story

  • One way of simplifying a story is to frame it as a human interest conflict drama, so don't be surprised if you are interviewed during an emergency and then find yourself shown in surprising "conflict" melodramas

    • I once found myself in "conflict" with Caltech (!!?) over the Northridge earthquake epicenter, and that was just mortifying. I called Caltech and they figured I'd been misquoted and said it happened to them all the time. I just found that article! http://articles.latimes.com/1994-02-02/local/me-18076_1_northridge-earthquake. This could be YOU; probably will be you in this line of work!

    • A good story of human conflict might be demonstrations protesting a hazard, e.g., interviewing people chaining themselves to the Canaveral pad from which Cassini-Huygens was to be launched and then getting the reactions of bewildered NASA personnel

    • Another example of this trope might be anxious parents of autistic children asking whether vaccinations could have caused this condition and exasperated public health officials pooh-poohing the idea and urging the conservation of "herd immunity" created by the majority of people having one or another vaccination.

  • Another common trope or story framework is what I like to call the "blame-seeking missile":

    • Most technological disasters and some natural disasters can include a significant human factor, such as a mistake made by some individual or a cost-cutting measure instituted by a high-level decision-maker. Recent cases include the Aliso Canyon methane leak above Porter Ranch in Los Angeles (a metal pipe broke 2,675 m (8,750 feet) below ground, in a section that had had a broken safety valve pulled out and replaced with unvalved pipe in 1979, which meant there was no way to shut the well down). Another case was the disastrous lead poisoning of the Flint, MI, water supply (to save costs, the city moved from buying the Detroit water it had been using, to use of the Flint River, which had a different pH. The usual anti-corrosion additives were not used, so the water corroded the old lead pipes that led from iron water mains to residents' plumbing systems and liberated the lead directly into residents' drinking water).

    • Whether or not this factor is present and no matter the magnitude of the human error, media will go after it like the investigative reporting of a high Mafia crime.

      • When significant human error or malfeasance is involved, this is a vital function of media and can lead to appropriate punishment of the truly guilty and improvements in procedures.

      • Sometimes, however, the blame-seeking is out of proportion, and it creates a "circle the wagons" culture in a besieged organization. This can make agencies, institutions, and companies resistant to information-sharing ... or needed internal discipline of incompetent or malevolent individuals: This is probably a familiar story to you folks in police departments! The upshot, however, can be a major obstacle to the implementation of a "learning organization culture" that can properly investigate itself, learn lessons, and implement improvements, in an internal atmosphere where people are less afraid to speak up and own up to honest mistakes, so that everyone can learn from them.

  • Media often perpetuate potentially dangerous disaster myths:

    • People are going to panic

    • There will be looting and crime

    • Dead bodies cause diseases and have to be pushed into mass graves before their families can identify them, reach closure, and grieve.

    • People should donate clothes, food, blankets to the Red Cross: Any aid is better than none (but it isn't, and all this random giving creates a logistical problem). To their credit, media are now encouraging monetary donations, not in-kind ones over the last several years.

  • Media are very keen to be "objective":

    • They are sensitive to being called biased -- the "liberal media" or "right-wing media" -- especially now when most towns only have one newspaper and there's no longer a tradition of one paper being the liberal one and its competitor being the conservative one.

    • Journalists know that they are not experts in all the domains about which they do stories and that that means they cannot really form an "objective" opinion, so what they try to do is report on "both" sides

    • That sounds reasonable: If a Democrat says "X," they'll interview a Republican who says "Y"; if professional opinion is not settled, they'll interview experts on "both" sides of a controversy, but there are what I like to call "plot complications":

      • Plot complication 1: Many stories have many more than "two" sides, and the public may need to have an organized summary of multiple viewpoints and their bases.

      • Plot complication 2: What if the story has 99% of experts on one side and 1% opposed? Giving both sides roughly "equal" time means the media sometimes create the illusion of parity between the bulk of scientific opinion and a few contrarians or even crackpots

        • Climate change

        • Evolution

        • Doug Copp and his chain e-mail "triangle of life" and "get as close to the outside of a building as possible in an earthquake" advice (here's the Red Cross comment: http://www2.bpaonline.org/Emergencyprep/arc-on-doug-copp.html

  • We've already seen that media can incorporate systematic biases in coverage:

    • The Northridge and Ferndale earthquakes showed a tendency for poorer and more minority-dominated communities to be undercovered

    • This bias does not require a malign intention to happen.

      • Most reporters are educated, middle-class people, disproportionately white -- when the earthquake hit and they got bounced out of bed along with everyone else, they started reporting from where they were, and they tend to live in middle-class neighborhoods and there was plenty to tell about there.

      • Given their demographics, some of them may have felt a little apprehensive to go into a Black neighborhood and, since there was so much to report where they were, they just carried on in their comfort zones, so Crenshaw, the hardest-hit Zip code in the City in terms of red-tagged (condemned) and yellow-tagged (repairable but not usable until repair and re-inspection) buildings, just dropped off their radar.

    • Sometimes, though, there IS explicit and conscious intent to discriminate:

      • Once, I was being interviewed by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who was trying to get a sound-bite out of me critical of NASA's risk assessment process.

      • We went around and around, and I wasn't going to give him his sound-bite.

      • After a while, we got to talking about other things, including the Northridge earthquake and Eugenie Rovai's and my findings of media bias. He then told me he had been working for the L.A. Times at the time of the Northridge earthquake, in their San Diego office. His editor there had specifically ordered the reporters not to cover stories in South and East San Diego (African-American neighborhoods), because "those people don't buy our paper anyway, so f * * k 'em!").

      • So, though I don't think most of the biasing effect is conscious or intentional, there are cases where it plainly is. And all of us carry around implicit biases that we did not sign up for, may not even suspect, and might find distressing to learn about ourselves when we find out we've engaged in a micro-aggression that hurts someone else. Reporters are no different.

  • An emerging problem is that of fake news. In a manner of speaking, today's fake news is what used to be called yellow journalism, going back to the 1890s.
    • There are a number of web sites that pose as legitimate news organizations, often copying much of their "look" to fool the unwary (here's a pip: ABC News, note the .co domain at the end of the .com seeming domain -- late breaking news: This URL now redirects to a new tabloid entity called KeyC).
      • Their goal is to capture readers by sensational click-bait, partly to generate or divert advertising and partly for mischief. Probably the most stunningly successful of these were about 100 or 150 sites all concentrated in a small, run-down town in Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia: Here is a link to a story in Wired that makes for a sobering read on how this works economically ... and its potential consequences.

      • Click-baiters are increasingly buying advertising space on ordinary news sites or news aggregator sites and having their ads placed right in the middle of the page so that they look a lot like a regular story on the page: That real news sites allow this kind of advertising speaks unflatteringly about their tolerance for adverisers blurring the boundary between ads and news. The original story about the Macedonian teenagers was broken by BuzzFeedNews and is itself lavishly decorated with such click-bait on the right side and the lower (under "Trending News" and "Top Buzz").

      • Readers fall for them but, more importantly, sometimes journalism professionals do, too.

      • Fake stories are then picked up and reported by reporters with the imprimatur of their bylines and then snowball into seeming respectability.

      • Here's a story describing the general problem: Murtha, Jack. 2016. How fake news sites frequently trick big-time journalists. Columbia Journalism Review.

    • Given hoaxsters' and rumor-mongers' predilection for spreading false information after a disaster, this could impede response or induce people to act in ways that might endanger them.

    • This whole topic has morphed yet again, pretty recently! As the concept of fake news has become more widely recognized, even by the most casual visitors to news sources online, it has been redefined and repurposed. Increasingly, we're hearing interviewees characterize normal media operations and the stories that result as fake news themselves, a declaration often accompanied by accusations of conspiracy and encouraging threats against reporters. Some worrisome side effects of this dynamic:
      • Fake news is going to create events for police to respond to, such as the Comet Ping Pong Pizza shooting in Washington, DC, in December 2016 (paywalled story).

      • It can interfere with attempts at mass communication by emergency managers during a disaster ... or it can create an actual emergency in its own right. An interesting example is a civil emergency management organization in Naples suddenly presented with an evacuation emergency when someone in Naples misinterpreted a story in National Geographic about Mt. Vesuvius as predicting an imminent eruption and got the mangled story out on social media! The reference is:

        Paradiso, Maria. 2012. Information and communication technologies and environmental safety: The case of Naples-Vesuvius, Italy. Journal of Urban Technology 19, 4: 45-58. doi: 10.1080/10630732.2012.715480. Abstract available:
        http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10630732.2012.715480.

      • Fake news is increasingly innoculating the public against receiving evidence-based scientific consensus on pressing environmental problems and risks, most notoriously in the case of climate change science. For compendia of the current knowledge-base on climate change and the many hazards it creates or exacerbates:
        • NOAA's Climate.gov
        • NASA's Global Climate Change site

    • Other media filters cited in this critical literature are external to the reporting function but have to do with the business model of the media companies.

      • There is intense capital concentration in the media

        • Fewer than 20 huge conglomerates own most of the media in the world. Some of the biggest ones are Google [the company now calling itself Alphabet], Charter/Time-Warner [merged into Spectrum], owns CNN and HBO), Comcast (owns NBCUniversal and Telemundo), Disney [owns ABC and ESPN], 21st Century Fox (owns 20th Century Fox, Fox News, National Geographic Channel), News Corporation (now only print media in the United States: Wall Street Journal), AT&T (DirectTV) Thomson-Reuters, National Amusements (owns Viacom and CBS), Bain Capital/Thomas H. Lee Partners (owns iHeartMedia, formerly known as Clear Channel), Gannett [USA Today], Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post, Sony (owns Sony Pictures, Sony Music), Hearst (newspapers, television), Bertelsmann, Cox Enterprises, and Sky. With media deregulation in the 1990s, they are now allowed to hold multiple outlets in the same market in the USA: newspapers, TV stations, radio stations.
          • In 1983, 90% of the global media market was controlled by 50 companies. As of 2016, that same 90% is held by six.

          • Here is an article and set of graphics that describes the holdings of the biggest six as of 2020: https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own- almost-all-media-infographic.

        • These media outlets are now subsidiaries of gigantic companies that have so many other functions and interests that journalistic culture is a tiny part of the overall picture and is being eroded: The papers, magazines, and broadcast stations are under tremendous pressure to add to the bottom line of their parent companies
          • Expensive functions, such as science sections and local investigative reporting, are being consolidated or dispensed with (the Boston Globe shut down its science section; the L.A. Times has been reducing its international bureaus) in favor of celebrity coverage, for example.

          • The eternal temptation to sensationalism is ramped up by this pressure, always the bane of hazard and disaster reportage

        • Local emergency coverage can be completely lost, and this can get people killed or hurt: In 2002, a train carrying anhydrous ammonia derailed in a little town in North Dakota (Minot). None of the local stations carried the story ... or evacuation orders ... because six of its nine radio stations were owned by Clear Channel Communications (now called iHeartCommunications) and were broadcasting various automatic feeds from company headquarters in Texas with one employee shared among the six stations. The local civil authorities tried to break into the designated Emergency Alert System (EAS) receiving station, which happened to be one of these six stations, KCJB, for an message, but their EAS didn't work (funky installation by a government contractor, police misunderstanding of how to use the new EAS, and no training available to show them how). They then tried calling the designated radio station and no-one picked up, so they could not get through. So, no story got out. 1,600 people were hurt, and one person died, at least partly for lack of access to local information caused by media consolidation.
          • Lasar, Matthew. 2010. Clear Channel still haunted by Minor toxic spill disaster. Ars Technica

          • Shafer, Jack. 2007. What really happened in Minot, N.D.? Slate

        • There is a real concern, too, that investigative reporting on a technological risk will be squelched if it involves the parent company of a newspaper or broadcast station ... or one of that parent company's many other subsidiaries (how far might a story about nuclear release issues get at NBC or MSNBC back when they were owned by GE, a major nuclear power contractor?).

      • Another big filter on coverage is the media dependence on advertising revenue

        • Editors know the old "80:20 rule" -- 80% of a typical company's profits come from 20% of their customers
          • For most, though not all companies, that 20% tends to be the better-off population: richer

          • Companies try to attract more of that desirable "market segment" through their advertising strategies, and editors know they have to prove that their paper or station or web site provides access to the desirable market segment

          • One way to lure readers/viewers/listeners of the desirable market segment is to showcase stories about people "just like them."

        • This is why that reporter's editor in San Diego told the reporters to lay off working on stories in South and East San Diego: Richer people don't really want to read about news there (unless it's spectacularly sensational, like a riot or crime incident), and the locals don't read the Times.

        • And that dependence on advertising is apt to lead to the kinds of bias we see in media reportage on disasters and hazardous situations.

        • It can also lead to reluctance to publish or broadcast a story reflecting poorly on a major advertising account (I knew a reporter at the Chico News & Review, who did a story on how workers at one of the local supermarkets would spray pesticide mist on the fruit and vegetable displays because of all those annoying little fruit flies. The supermarket chain called his editor and chewed him out and then pulled their advertising, which really clobbered the weekly's revenue stream)

        • An interesting insider view of advertising pressure is seen in Gloria Steinem's 1990 article in Ms. Magazine explaining why the magazine decided to revert to subscription and newsstand support, rather than accept advertising: This is a microcosm of what every editor of an advertising-dependent outlet faces. The article is reprinted at http://www.publishingbiz.com/html/articlebysteinem.html.

    So, the media are problematic in the way they cover hazardous situations and disasters (and a lot of other things!) with their sensationalism, occasional inaccuracies and oversimplification, their tendency to frame issues as human dramas and blame games, their eccentric idea of "objectivity," their tendency to systematic biases, and the filtering effects of media consolidation and dependence on advertising revenue. Now what can a risk assessment scientist, a disaster planner, an emergency manager, or first-responder do about something that can strongly impact their work?

    • Dealing with bias:

      • During an event's emergency response and restoration phases:

        • Be very aware that media reports on a disaster will almost certainly not be adequately representative of the needs on the ground that you're expected to meet. Emergency operations should include routine, independent assessment of the entire area affected by the disaster.

        • This can include sending people around to do systematic visual checks of all neighborhoods in the area, which may be challenging in those first few hours of chaos.

        • If you're part of an outside organization, such as the Red Cross or one of the religious organizations, you might have your office print up Census maps of the area you're being sent to, so that you know where the poorer areas are ahead of time and can arrange for needs assessment there.

        • Many ethnic and racial minority communities maintain small media of their own, perhaps a Spanish-language newspaper or broadcast station, a Hmong language variety show, an African-American newspaper: Having a list of these for your area and then systematically contacting them after a disaster might lead to information about areas not covered by the mass media ... and provide avenues for effective incident communication and education in all the languages that might be present in your area.

      • During pre-event phases, such as during disaster planning and mitigation and preparation:

        • Identify groups and areas that might be undercovered in the next disaster and learn who the leaders and activist organizations are in those groups. Who is influential in the various ethnic and racial groups, in the immigrant communities, in the LGBTQ community, homeless advocates (and veterans' organizations, since ~40% of the homeless are veterans, just a really poignant statistic), senior and youth groups, disabled advocacy groups, women's organizations, perhaps local unions? Perhaps some of these are organized around churches or political advocacy groups.

        • Task someone to start cultivating occasional ties with these channels of influence. A good way to start a dialogue might be asking to advertise something like an event on household disaster preparedness or the Community Emergency Response Teams programs or ??? Just having semi-regular ad hoc ties with particular individuals will give you avenues to communicate with media-undercovered groups ahead of time and give you a way of getting someone in these communities working on culturally or socially appropriate risk education ahead of time. As familiarity and trust build, it also helps you establish these individuals' availability to help you get your messages out when things really start hitting the fan.

    • Getting ahead of media inaccuracies and sensationalism and story framing:

      • First, respect journalists' situation, which might sound a little odd after I've been calling attention to all these problems. Like you, reporters are trying to do their jobs as best they can, in emergency conditions that are chaotic and bewildering. In non-emergencies, they may be trying to learn about a hazardous situation, without your training and expertise. Help them do their jobs, and they may help make your job a little less challenging when it really counts.

      • Here is their situation. A disaster hits, and they have to start working on it right away, perhaps with no warning to start getting prepared, with little knowledge of the hazard that produced the disaster. They have to file their stories very quickly: They have insane deadline pressure coming from the physical demands of their particular medium and from the economic demand to avoid getting "scooped" by another outfit. That's partly why they may produce uneven and biased coverage: They don't have time to go scouting all over the place and will often prefer just to converge where other reporters are, which is how disasters acquire iconic images.
        • Rodeo the dog in the North State floods of 1997
        • Northridge Meadows Apartments next to intact Northridge Apartments
        • Evacuated animals on the beach in the Woolsey Fire

      • In a disaster, they don't have the time to find out who the experts are and sometimes that leads them to taking information from less than qualified sources.

      • To get ahead of this, you might cultivate particular reporters in pre-event times: Many of them try to develop "beats" or areas of journalistic expertise, though that's getting harder for them to do these days, and they truly do value learning who the various real experts are and being put in touch with them. They value becoming the local journalistic expert in something, such as hazards. The late Jack Popejoy of the CBS affiliates down here in L.A. comes to mind: He would show up at hazards conferences to learn right along with the rest of us, and hazards and science were his beats.

      • Your organization might think about designating a particular point person to specialize in interacting with the media, someone with expertise in handling their needs and that the media are trained to seek out in the event of a disaster, a formal or informal public information officer.

        • A good model for this is how Kate Hutton of Caltech and Lucy Jones of the USGS became the go-to people whenever there's an earthquake in Southern California or, indeed, the world.

        • Something really beneficial in this is you can use some of your time with a reporter to educate them about how media sometimes encourage disaster myths, thinking these urban legends are real.

      • Anyone who takes on this rôle should learn to focus their messages pretty tightly. Maybe, when you meet with a reporter or get into a press conference situation, pick out three simple points that you absolutely need to get across to them, and their audience, and maybe another two it would be nice to work in there if the opportunity arises. Rehearse them and stay on message. Every time you get asked about something away from these topics, somehow bring your answers back to your key points. This kind of repetition helps the reporters and gives them something coherent to write down and translate into lay terms. It really takes a certain talent to do this, to keep the reporters focussed on your message, and not everyone can do it. Your organization needs to find the people who can and get them to take on this chore and, basically, become the designated media "stars," kind of like Drs. Hutton and Jones.

    • Then, there's the Internet ....

      • There's been a rise of the "citizen-journalist" -- bloggers, microbloggers (the site formerly known as Twitter, Tumblr), web authors, YouTube and TikTok uploaders, e-mail forwarders. No longer are media the preserve of just a few highly concentrated oligarchies that require enormous amounts of money to break into. Nowadays, someone who wants to report, or just rant, needs only an ISP or 4G/5G or WiFi hotspot access and very basic equipment and software/apps, and many of these are becoming as influential as traditional media (think of Raw Story, the Huffington Post, and the Drudge Report).

        • On the one hand, this democratizes the media: Anyone can participate.

        • On the other hand is the possibility of demagoguery: Anyone can spread vicious lies, innuendo, misinformation, and they do. Rumor-mongering during a disaster can now go viral. In many ways, my Cassini project was all about how two individuals created a massive mobilization against a NASA mission over wildly amplified risk.

      • This is going to be an ever-more important part of a scientist's, disaster planner's, and emergency manager's background noise:

        • Media companies are in a lot of financial trouble now because classified advertising has migrated to Craig's List and eBay and the like and no-one is willing to pay for access to news articles online (and thereby pay for the reporters' labor). This is probably going to amplify media tendencies toward trivial entertainment and away from supporting investigative journalism, which will make it harder for your organizations to strike up relationships with reporters.

        • On the positive side, scientists, planners, and emergency managers can themselves take to the Internet, maintaining organizational websites, Facebook, and X-Twitter pages with the public education and risk communication information you want out there, using social networks and listservers to push information out ... and to get out ahead of rumors, to become your own media, so to speak.
    

    Dr. Rodrigue's Home |   Geography Home |   EMER Home |   ES&P Home

    BeachBoard |   CSULB Home |   Library |   Bookstore

    

    Document maintained by Dr. Rodrigue
    Last revision: 09/04/23