Risky Business

Tempting as it may be, however, we must be careful not to conclude on the basis of this correlational evidence alone that the media are necessarily responsible for distorting our perceptions of risk. It may be just the opposite: perhaps media professionals are simply responsive to our fears and interests, reporting what they perceive to be newsworthy to us. It may be that a "third variable"--such as the relative degree of controllability or the catastrophic nature inherent in different causes of death--causes both our fears and media coverage. A case can be made for each of these explanations for the observed link between media coverage and beliefs, as well as others, and the broad array of factors that are involved appear to be complexly intertwined.

Fortunately, however, we are in a position to evaluate this relationship armed with more than correlational evidence. Evidence from controlled experimentation shows a causal influence of vivid information on our judgments, and the additional causal influence of memorial availability on our judgments represents a likely mediator of the vividness effect. This knowledge makes it very difficult to deny that the media exerts some measure of causal influence on our fears. Debating the strength of this effect or whether it operates in a reciprocal fashion is certainly worthwhile, but it does not allow us to escape from the conclusion that any systematic departure from reality in the media is likely to be mirrored in our beliefs.

Falling Airplane Parts Revisited

Aside from a close miss by what was reported to be a falling airplane part early in The Truman Show, I cannot personally recall ever having heard of such an incident, fictitious or real. Students over the years have told me that they recall stories of people having found fallen airplane parts, but not of an actual fatality resulting from such falling parts. Shark attacks, on the other hand, are easily imagined and widely reported. Moreover, in the first movie that comes to my mind, the shark in Jaws actually did cause several fatalities. It may come as some surprise, then, to learn that in an average year in the United States thirty times more people are killed by falling airplane parts than by shark attacks ("Death Odds" 1990).

By this point, it has probably become evident how Plous (1993) constructed all four of the questions that I borrowed at the beginning of this article. Within each pair of causes of death, one tends to be reported more frequently than the other in the popular media. The correct answers (as given by Plous 1993) are: falling airplane parts, lightning, stomach cancer, and diabetes.

Simply put, then, the media paradox operates this way: Events must be somewhat unusual in order to be considered newsworthy, but the very fact of their appearance in the news leads us to overestimate their frequency of occurrence. We may therefore come to believe that relatively rare events are common, taking precautionary measures against unlikely dangers at the neglect of more significant hazards. At any given time, we are bombarded with warnings about particular hazards that often turn out to be far less significant threats to our well-being than initially advertised. Gilovich (1991) discussed widespread media reports on the chances of contracting HIV through heterosexual sex. He quotes Oprah Winfrey as having said that "Research studies now project that one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That's by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me." This has obviously turned out to be a gross exaggeration, and although the transmission of HIV through heterosexual sex is a serious public health issue, it is nonetheless important to keep the degree of danger in perspective.