Media underplay technology hazards.

The public commonly feels that the news media distort and exaggerate the perils of modern technology. However, research indicates that major newspapers, at least, do a fair job of covering oil spills, nuclear accidents, and airplane crashes.

"The common belief could not be more wrong," maintains William R. Freudenburg, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and the lead author of the study. "Instead of blowing risk out of proportion, reporters may, in fact, be underplaying the dangers inherent to a technological world."

The researchers examined how risk is portrayed by the news media, utilizing a sampling of 128 "hazard events," as covered by The New York Times and several other major newspapers. A detailed analysis of factual summaries of articles portraying everything from handgun violence to environmental degradation showed that what apparently drives coverage are the magnitude and severity of an incident, not a presumed desire to sensationalize or use bad news to sell newspapers. "Contrary to our expectations, objective indicators of hazard--casualties and other damages--remain the only statistically significant predictors of the amount of media coverage."

That discovery was so surprising, Freudenburg says, that he was moved to perform an analysis of the full text of stories\as well as headlines and pictures. 'We thought the factual summaries may have...