Whats the cancer risk headline for this week? Recently, cell phones and breast implants haveonce againbeen hot topics as research findings and legal settlements are announced, but its anyones guess what new cancer fears will turn up next on the news pages and the airwaves.
In a book published last year, S. Robert Lichter, Ph.D., president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, Washington, D.C., and Stanley Rothman, Ph.D., director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change at Smith College, Northampton, Mass., argue that the environmentalist movement has been so successful in winning the hearts and minds of journalists that media coverage of cancer causes is skewed sharply toward environmental bugaboos that cause few if any cases of human cancer.
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By contrast, Lichter and Rothmans analysis of cancer causes cited in print and broadcast news stories from 1972 to 1992 found that man-made chemicals ranked first, and food additives, pollution, man-made radiation, and pesticidescauses generally ranked low by scientistsmade the top 10.
What accounts for the disparity? Lichter and Rothman argue that environmental activists and journalists typically share backgrounds, beliefs, and political values that make them natural allies. "Journalists tend to be highly educated, sophisticated, liberal-minded people," Rothman said in an interview. "The activists in environmental organizations are very similar types. And they share a desire to improve the world." Thus, he said, reporters are likely to admire and trust environmentalists, while disliking and mistrusting sources from industry.
Lichter and Rothman also polled cancer scientists on their political views to see whether they might harbor biases that would make them downplay environmental cancer risks. But they found scientists "a left-leaning group." Self-described liberals outnumbered conservatives by three to one, and Democrats outnumbered Republicans by four to one.
David Ropeik, director of risk communication for the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, was a Boston TV reporter and anchorman for 25 years, won numerous awards for environmental investigative reporting, and was on the Society of Environmental Journalists board for 9 years.
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However noble their motives, Ropeik said, these journalists betray a fundamental tenet of their professional ethics. "The line is crossed when they allow their progressive personal views to color the skepticism they apply to information they collect, believe, and disseminate," hardening the skepticism toward industry, for example, and softening it when dealing with environmental groups. This does the public a disservice by feeding the widespread belief that we live in a riskier time than we have ever lived in before."
"As regards cancer," Ropeik said, "I found [many environmental journalists] biased towards presuming the worst about putative carcinogenic agents."
He pointed out, however, that this is far from unique or surprising. "All journalists do that with every risk all the timeit is human nature for most daily journalists to want to play up the dramatic or negative or frightening aspects of anything," he said. "Its as simple as wanting to be on page one instead of page 31, [and] its true of any risk, its true in politics, in crime, in education, in any news coverage."
The exception may be when journalists perceive a situation as a crisis. Rothman noted that initial coverage of the AIDS epidemic was careful and unsensational, downplaying risk. Similarly, risk communication specialist Peter M. Sandman, Ph.D., professor of environmental and community medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, N.J., believes that the medias alarmist tendency in reporting risk is considerably toned down when a genuine crisis occurs. Sandman worked with a federal commission to analyze news coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in its immediate aftermath, finding that "the coverage turned out more reassuring than alarming (and arguably more reassuring than it ought to have been . . .)."
The American Council on Science and Health reviews what it calls "the greatest unfounded health scares of recent times" in its 1998 publication Facts Versus Fears (online at http://www.acsh.org/publications/reports/factsfears.html). Most of the 25 episodes described in the report stemmed wholly or largely from cancer fears, from the nationwide "cranberry scare" of 1959 to the closing of a Harlem elementary school in 1997 after slightly elevated levels of the dry-cleaning chemical perchloroethylene were found.
The role of the news media in these "scares" appears to have shifted over the four decades covered in the ACSH report. In the cranberry incident, a small portion of the crop in Oregon and Washington was found contaminated with aminotriazole, a weed killer that gave rats thyroid tumors. U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Arthur Fleming warned the nation2 weeks before Thanksgivingthat it would be prudent to avoid all cranberry products. According to the ACSH report, "The New York Times (among others) declared early on that Fleming went too far in provoking an unnecessary panic. The Times noted that even if humans should prove to be as susceptible to the chemicals as rats, people would have to consume fantastic quantities of contaminated berries to suffer any ill effects."
ACSH views the notorious Alar apple scare as the peakor troughof environmental scaremongering. By that time the media had long been accustomed to fanning rather than dousing the flames in environmental cancer flare-ups over cyclamates, nitrites in hot dogs, diethylstilbestrol (DES) in beef, and other substances. In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council fed to CBSs 60 Minutes a report on the growth-regulating chemical Alar (daminozide), which the group claimed caused cancer in children. When the NRDC claims and the alarming CBSs 60 Minutes program proved to be greatly overblown, according to ACSH, science writers, other journalists, and the public at large became more skeptical and environmental scares, while not disappearing entirely, became less frenzied.
Lichter and Rothman also point to evidence that at least some journalists, without being anti-environmentalist, have begun to take a more skeptical and balanced view of environmental risk claims, including Keith Schneider of the New York Times, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times, and Gregg Easterbrook of Newsweek. On the other hand, they noted that these are minority voices and that "more journalists have attacked . . . than supported them."
How can journalists get a more balanced view of environmental issues?
"Work harder, try to overcome your biases, try to find the best sources," Rothman said. "Newspapers are always doing polls," he added. "I dont see why they cant poll the cancer community" to decide which risks to emphasize.
Ropeik said many journalists are doing more accurate and fair reporting of environmental issues in recent years, as the field of environmental journalism has "grown up" and shed its early naïveté. In particular, he said, the Society of Environmental Journalists, founded in 1990, "challenged us to be more objective, more thorough . . . and profoundly raised the quality of environmental journalism. Anyone covering this field over time has started to understand the gray areas, the complexities, the emotional filters coloring all this stuff."
But Ropeik cautioned that the consolidation of media ownership threatens environmental news coverage. As corporate owners focus on the bottom line, less popular news topics, including environmental stories, get less column space and less air time.
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