The Evening News Report: Did We Scare You?
Last week, the "Evening News" ran a series called "Safe Enough To Eat?," which dealt with food safety. It gave us a good opportunity to talk about a certain fine line that nightly newscasts have to walk – the one between responsible coverage and sensationalism.
Good stories sometimes deal with scary subjects, and media outlets have nothing to apologize for when they handle those subjects responsibly. The problem comes when news outlets hype stories and fail to provide the appropriate context. Let's say a woman goes to the hospital because she had an adverse reaction to the chemicals left in her carpet after a cleaning. It was a rare reaction unlikely to occur in anyone else. A responsible news outlet probably wouldn't cover the story. An irresponsible one? "CAN YOUR CARPET KILL YOU? Find out tonight as we look at one woman's horrific ordeal."
So how did the "Evening News" do with food safety? The topic is a legitimate one, certainly: The recent salmonella outbreak in peanut butter and E coli outbreak in packaged spinach are a testament to that. It's worth taking a close look at the stories themselves, however.
Bob Orr's piece on "agro-terrorism" could have verged into irresponsible scaremongering, in light of the topic. But Orr resisted the temptation to overdo it, even opting to spend a large chunk of the piece on economic threats instead of biological ones. John Blackstone's story on California farmers trying to make food safer was also measured and fair. The only piece that gave me pause was Wyatt Andrews' report on federal regulation of food safety. The meat of the segment, if you'll forgive the pun, was great – a discussion of the problems caused by a "hodgepodge" of food regulation by the feds. The problem was the way the story was framed: With the story of Lisa Brott, a 50-year-old fitness buff who got sick from E. coli. Andrews asked her this: "What do you think it says that someone in the shape that you are in got as sick as you got?" The message behind the exchange was that no matter who you are, you can be brought down by E. coli. And while that's certainly true, it struck me as a bit much to put so fine a point on it instead of just letting the facts speak for themselves.
Another story last week that had to walk this fine line was Daniel Sieberg's report on "cyber-bullying" – that is, kids being bullied on the Internet. I've written before on how stories about what can happen to children on the Internet run the risk of veering into sensationalism. There is no doubt that the Internet has assisted some school bullies, and the piece even discusses one boy whose suicide may have been partly due to cyber-bullying. The question is to what degree this is a real issue – isn't cyber-bullying just the newest iteration of plain old bullying, something that has been around since the dawn of time?
I'll leave it to the commenters in Sieberg's piece to duke it out. "Life is full of real problems, and this isn't one of them," writes one. "Proclaiming that it is just creates a social climate of over-dramatization, where everything is a crisis, and as a result kids lack basic coping skills." Another argued that the report didn't go far enough, however. Writes the commenter: "Your report on cyberbullying significantly understates the magnitude, complexity and devastation of this out-of-control modern phenomenon."