News coverage of Fukushima disaster minimized health risks to general population
Sociology professor Caline-Marie Pascale of the American University in Washington, D.C. has published a research analysis of U.S. news media coverage of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Her analysis of more than 2,000 news articles from four major U.S. outlets from March 11, 2011 through March 11, 2013 found that only 6 percent of the coverage focused on health risks to the public in Japan or elsewhere.
From the article on the university's website, News Coverage of Fukushima Disaster Found Lacking...
"It's shocking to see how few articles discussed risk to the general population, and when they did, they typically characterized the risk as low," said Pascale, who studies the social construction of risk and meanings of risk in the 21st century. "We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant."
Focusing on print articles, editorials and letters from
The Washington Post and
The New York Times as well as
Politico and
The Huffington Post online, Pascale identified three primary ways by which risks of radioactive contamination were minimized for public consumption. These sources were chosen because they are the most cited sources by television news and talk shows, other newspapers, blogs and social media.
First, comparisons to mundane low-level exposures - the old "banana equivalent dose" along with all too familiar comparisons to a cross-country flight or chest x-ray - were used repeatedly without acknowledgement that radiation dose is cumulative in nature, that there are different types of radiation that present different types of risks, or that the dismissive toss-off "about equal to annual background" really means that public exposure in that instance has doubled - twice as much radiation is not equal to half as much radiation, though excess doses of radiation were characterized that way in these media outlets relentlessly.
Secondly, news reports dismissed the possibility of harm from radiation by claiming the risks of radiation exposure are "unknowable." Last but not least, these news sources excluded concerns by experts and residents of the Fukushima region who challenged the propaganda narrative being pushed...
The research shows that corporations and government agencies had disproportionate access to framing the event in the media, Pascale says. Even years after the disaster, government and corporate spokespersons constituted the majority of voices published. News accounts about local impact - for example, parents organizing to protect their children from radiation in school lunches - were also scarce.
Pascale characterizes communication of the risks surrounding disasters natural or man-made are really political struggles to control the level of public awareness of events and their consequences, and to control the meaning people will attach to big events.
"How knowledge about disasters is reported can have more to do with relations of power than it does with the material consequences to people's lives," Pascale says. IOW, power calls the shots, the media works for power, and we the people are just the livestock to be kept fat and happy as we're herded into the slaughterhouse chute. It's not about truth, or about helping the public understand the nature of a disaster, its risks and how they may protect themselves from harm. It's about keeping them as clueless as possible so that power can do as it pleases without having to explain the political, economic and social choices it makes that create and/or exacerbate broad-scale risks to the public.
For more information on how the public's understanding of manmade disasters and their perceptions of risk are manipulated by the news media in service to power, see:
How do we perceive risk? Paul Slovic's landmark analysis
Risk as Moral Danger: the Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health
Exxon Valdez 2014: Does media coverage of humanmade disasters contribute to consumer complacency?
Lies, damned lies, and statistics