Nuclear Power Coverage Focused Morbidly on Risk : Environment: Stories stressed alleged dangers and often showed little scientific understanding of the issue. A government task force found reporting on Three Mile Island to be ‘abysmally inadequate.’

Three Mile Island.

Even now, 15 years after the accident and shutdown of the nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa., the words conjure images of nuclear energy run amok, a disaster, a near-holocaust.

But no one was killed at Three Mile Island, and an independent review found no convincing evidence of increased cancer incidence in the area in the six years after the accident. Residents probably put themselves at greater risk driving away from Three Mile Island than they would have by staying.

Nevertheless, as the late British journalist Henry Fairlie wrote in the New Republic in 1989, “Three Mile Island in the American mind is an emblem of catastrophe.

“At Three Mile Island,” he wrote, “the fail-safe system worked. The power station switched itself off. There was a scare, but no disaster. Yet . . . nuclear power in America, as in no other nation, has been almost paralyzed” ever since, largely because of the scare coverage of the news media on that event and on nuclear energy in general.

“There is by now considerable documentation that public opposition to risky technologies rises and falls with the volume of reporting,” writes Alan Mazur, professor of public affairs at Syracuse University and editor of the summer, 1994, issue of the quarterly journal Risk: Health, Safety & Environment.

The coverage of nuclear energy--before, during and after Three Mile Island--is especially significant because nuclear energy was the first major political issue of the environmental movement. In fact, it helped shape that movement, says Dianne Dumanoski, longtime science and environment writer for the Boston Globe, now on leave to write a book on the impact of artificial chemicals on fetal development.

The environmental movement emerged in the 1970s, “the time that journalism was in the throes of post-Watergate chest-puffing,” in the words of Robert Lichter, co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington.

“Journalists were looking for the next Watergate,” Lichter says; in the process, “a technological issue became a political and moral issue.”

Although some news media covered Three Mile Island responsibly, most did not. David Rubin, who chaired a government task force that examined the coverage, said confusion among government and utility officials contributed significantly to poor media coverage. But he also said journalists covering the accident “knew shockingly little about nuclear power and compounded their ignorance by focusing too narrowly on worst-case scenario questions.”

The task force called the radiation coverage “abysmally inadequate” and said reporters had made improper comparisons and factually impossible statements and provided insufficient background information.

“To a reader or viewer trying to decide whether to pack his bags and run, radiation reports in the media were often as useless as a baseball score of 6-4 that neglected to mention which teams had played,” the commission said.

Some coverage of nuclear energy has been worse than useless.

A 13-year study of nuclear coverage in seven major print and broadcast news outlets by Lichter’s center concluded that major media coverage of nuclear energy in general is unfair, providing a “predominantly negative spin” that strongly emphasizes the alleged dangers of nuclear energy.

In the early 1980s, as Charles Krauthammer, the syndicated columnist, recently observed in Time magazine, “the U.S. experienced a nuclear hysteria--a morbid, near-panicked fear of nuclear apocalypse.” This frenzy of fear was fanned by, among others, the “mindless media,” Krauthammer wrote.

In 1971, eight years before Three Mile Island, 58% of Americans polled said they would be willing to have nuclear power plants in their communities. The tide of public opinion began to turn against nuclear power throughout the 1970s; by 1980, the year after Three Mile Island, 63% were opposed, and 28% were willing.

Thus, when Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, asked various groups of people to rank 30 activities and technologies in terms of risk, college students and members of the League of Women Voters ranked nuclear power as the No. 1 hazard. They judged it to be more dangerous than guns, smoking, alcohol, driving a car or working as a policeman.

Slovic, the president of Decision Research Inc. in Eugene, Ore., and a longtime expert on risk perception and assessment, gave the same list to medical and scientific experts. They rated nuclear energy No. 20--after all these other hazards and after swimming, bicycling and X-rays.

As part of its studies, the Center for Media and Public Affairs also conducted a survey that included questions on nuclear energy. The center’s survey compared the attitudes of journalists who write about science with the attitudes of three groups of experts--engineers, energy scientists and nuclear specialists.

The experts strongly favored “rapid nuclear development,” by majorities ranging from 69% to 82%; only 24% of science journalists favored “rapid nuclear development.” Journalists who thought reactors were “very unsafe” and who thought present risks were “not acceptable” and who favored a nuclear moratorium outnumbered the experts by margins ranging from 2-to-1 up to 8-to-1.

“None of this proves that journalists consciously set out to slant their reporting against nuclear energy,” the center report said, and indeed most responsible journalists work hard to keep their personal opinions from unfairly influencing their stories. But journalists are only human, and some “leakage” from the personal to the professional, however subconscious, may at times be inevitable.

Public perceptions of risk are conditioned by much more than just the news media, though--especially on an issue as volatile as nuclear energy.

With nuclear energy, there is the immediate specter of The Bomb. Mushroom clouds. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The End of the World.

The Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 only compounded these fears.

Any mention of nuclear power evokes “echoes of the bomb,” of something with risks that are “catastrophic rather than incremental,” says Clarence (Terry) Davies, director of the Center for Risk Management at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank that specializes in environmental issues.

Nicholas Wade, science and health editor of the New York Times, says, “Everyone’s sense of proportion seems to fly out the window as soon as you mention that something might be radiating.” Hence the panicky reaction in many quarters to proposals to “irradiate” some food products to kill food-borne diseases and extend shelf life.

Experts say irradiation could rid hamburger meat of new bacteria that pose “a clear and present danger to our public health” and that killed four people and made more than 500 ill last year after they ate at Jack in the Box outlets in the Pacific Northwest.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the irradiation of fruits, vegetables, chicken and some dairy products; in July, a panel of medical experts urged the agency to approve irradiation of some hamburger meat.

But two states have banned irradiation, and many Americans remain convinced that it causes cancer, even though there has been no scientific evidence.

Radiation from medical X-rays, including mammograms, also frightens some people. Doctors caution against excessive, unnecessary X-rays, for fear of the potential carcinogenic effects of repeated exposure, but many people worry unnecessarily about routine--and medically recommended--X-rays, as well as about radiation in airplanes and from video display terminals and other sources. Ironically--sadly--this fear leads some people to delay or refuse X-rays that could lead to the discovery, diagnosis and treatment of diseases far more likely to kill them than X-rays.

Feeding a Nation’s Nuclear Fears

Media coverage of nuclear energy--and especially of Three Mile Island--contributed significantly to what many scientists say is an unreasonable fear in the public.