{"id":8587,"date":"2011-04-02T11:01:56","date_gmt":"2011-04-02T15:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8587"},"modified":"2011-04-02T11:03:31","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T15:03:31","slug":"cultural-bias-and-bad-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/02\/cultural-bias-and-bad-reporting\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultural bias and<\/em> bad reporting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jon sent me this link<\/a>, which discusses the media coverage of the Fukushima workers:<\/p>\n

\n

We hear of Fukushima workers \u201cfleeing\u201d the plant, when what happened is they left for a few hours.<\/p>\n

We hear about the appearance of tiny amounts of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water — but nothing the next day, when it returns to safe levels.<\/p>\n

We hear a thousand commentators mention one measurement that was ten million times normal — but nothing when that turns out to have been a measurement error, made by someone who had little sleep and the weight of the world on his shoulders.<\/p>\n

We hear people spinning tales of \u201cworst case scenarios\u201d ten thousand times worse than anything that could plausibly happen — and almost nothing about the fact that the Fukushima reactors endured an earthquake 32 times as forceful as they had been designed for, followed by a tsunami twice as high, and still largely survived.<\/p>\n

We hear about \u201cplutonium in the soil\u201d — but not that it\u2019s an amount so tiny that pound for pound, bananas in the grocery store are five thousand times more radioactive.<\/p>\n

The London Daily Mail<\/em> reports that the workers \u201cexpect to die,\u201d but not that the worst radiation exposure among all the workers amounts to about as much as 15 CT scans, a dose that not only isn\u2019t fatal, but that has no observable health effects.<\/p>\n

A lot of bad reporting seems to come from mere scientific illiteracy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Not only scientific illiteracy, but willful illiteracy<\/em>. Combine the need to file a story — the more sensational, the better — with the anti-scientific bias that’s been “baked in” to journalism students for two generations, and this is what you get.<\/p>\n

\n

Some of it may be simply that fear sells papers, and a headline that says \u201cCatastrophe imminent\u201d sells more papers than \u201cCatastrophe averted.\u201d<\/p>\n

But a lot of it appears to be purposeful — it\u2019s no coincidence that the people spinning the wildest tales of catastrophe have also turned out to be associated with vehemently anti-nuclear think tanks and political pressure groups.<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s because of ignorance or on purpose, the effect of this misreporting it to keep people afraid.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon sent me this link, which discusses the media coverage of the Fukushima workers: We hear of Fukushima workers \u201cfleeing\u201d the plant, when what happened is they left for a few hours. We hear about the appearance of tiny amounts of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water — but nothing the next day, when it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,28],"tags":[467,39,213,107,646,693,101],"class_list":["post-8587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-media","tag-earthquake","tag-junkscience","tag-newspapers","tag-nukes","tag-tokyo","tag-tsunami","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2ev","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8587"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8589,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8587\/revisions\/8589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}