2 NEWS COVERAGE OF NUCLEAR WAR THREATS

BOX 7.2 NEWS COVERAGE OF NUCLEAR WAR THREATS

Although a terribly important story, nuclear war is an ongoing continual threat that does not have many of the characteristics of a newsworthy story on a day-to-day basis. D.M. Rubin and Cummings (1989) conducted a content analysis of network news coverage of three stories related to the nuclear threat that appeared in 1983, in the last high point of the Cold War threat. The first was the proposal of the new scientific theory of nuclear winter, which proposed that a nuclear war would trigger enough fires to send up enough smoke, dust, and soot to block 95% of the sun’s light in many latitudes, to be soon followed by a huge disruption of the ecosystem and growing season and the possible destruction of all humanity. The second event was the televising of the fictional ABC movie The Day After about a Soviet nuclear attack on Kansas; this became the highest rated TV movie up to that time. Embraced by the antinuclear movement and attacked by conservatives, its impact was weaker than either group predicted (Scholfield & Pavelchak, 1985). The third story was the continuing public discussion by members of the Reagan administration about the possibility of fighting and winning a limited nuclear war.

Compared to what one might expect about their importance, D.M. Rubin and Cummings (1989) found coverage of these three stories to be minimal and offered four possible explanations for this slighting. It may

be that TV journalism had accepted that life could not survive a nuclear exchange; additional evidence was thus uncritically embraced and ignored. The nuclear winter story and the message of The Day After was “not so much displaced…as smothered by uncritical acceptance” (Rubin & Cummings, p. 49). A second, more paternalistic possibility is that TV news had decided that viewers were too threatened and emotionally unable to handle any more discussion of this issue. Third, it is possible that TV journalism had decided that nuclear weapons were here to stay and thus should not be politicized by arousing controversy. In support of such a view is the fact that the network cut a line from The Day After

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which stated that the justification for the Soviet attack was the U.S. movement of Pershing missiles, and also the fact that there was very little questioning of the Reagan administration’s assumptions about nuclear war. Finally, the paltry coverage may have been due to the fact that TV has acquired only a limited inventory of images for communicating the horror of nuclear war, such as computer graphics, writer landscapes, file footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pentagon film of missile tests, or scenes of everyday life with a voice-over intoning the consequences of nuclear war.

In conclusion, the “coverage of these events in 1983 was fatalistic, overly respectful of government, visually unimaginative, and politically neutralized. The strongest impression of the image of nuclear war on television news in the Reagan years was of no image at all” (Rubin & Cummings, 1989, p. 56).

Action. The third characteristic of a newsworthy event is that it contains action and some observable occurrence. This often becomes the hook on which to hang what is essentially a more abstract story. For example, trends in inflation may be covered by interviews with specific consumers shopping and expressing their views on rising prices. Important stories that do not have such a convenient hook or discrete encapsulating event receive less attention. For example, the dramatic shift in the Third World over the last 50 years from domestic-food producing to export agriculture is a profound change, but it is seldom mentioned in the news because it is not easily symbolized by discrete events or manifest in crisis points.

Novelty and Deviance. The fourth characteristic of hard news is that it is novel or deviant. Contrary to the “late breaking news” metaphor, most news is not particularly surprising. For example, much political and economic news is covered by the normal beat reporters who know in advance that certain speeches will be made, votes taken, or meetings held. Events outside this predictable range of news will stand a better chance of being covered if they are novel, with chances of coverage increasing as the events get more strange and bizarre. A junkie being shot to death in New York City may not

be big news, but a Sunday school teacher killed in a Satanic ritual in rural Saskatchewan is. An event may be deviant in different senses (Shoemaker, Chang, & Brendlinger, 1987; Shoemaker, Danielian, & Brendlinger, 1987). Statistical deviance refers purely to the frequency of an event, with highly unusual events being the most deviant. Normative deviance involves the degree of violation of social and legal norms. Pritchard and Hughes (1997) offer evidence from an analysis of homicide reports that normative deviance is a

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more important component of newsworthiness than is statistical deviance. Finally, potential for social change deviance refers to how much the existing status quo is threatened, a type of deviance very high in terrorist events like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal office building or, most extraordinarily, the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Link to Ongoing Themes. Finally, events are more likely to be covered in news if they are linked to themes of ongoing current interest. Some of these themes are deep seated, almost archetypal, at least within a given society. For example, the first theme, appearance versus reality, has always been a common theme in literature and drama. News stories about deception and hypocrisy make good copy; the Watergate scandal of 1972 to 1974, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, was one of the hottest news stories in the nation’s history. Second, big versus little is a powerful theme, nicely captured by some of the crusading stories on 60 Minutes or 20/20. Closely related is good versus evil, a moral framework often imposed on news stories (e.g., the brave consumer vs. the evil polluting corporation, righteous America versus the evil dictator). The fourth theme is efficiency versus inefficiency, commonly used in stories such as exposes of government or corporate waste or mismanagement. Finally, the unique versus routine highlights the unusual.

Besides these underlying, archetypal themes we also have cyclical themes such as the quadrennial presidential elections in the United States and seasonal, holiday, and weather themes. For example, we know we will see the Pope saying midnight mass on Christmas, the groundhog looking for his shadow every February 2, and local news reporters in the spring in the Midwest telling us how to protect ourselves from tornadoes. Such events appear in the news because they fit the cyclical themes, in spite of having few of the other characteristics of newsworthy events.

Secondary Characteristics of a Newsworthy Event Inoffensiveness. Besides the five basic characteristics of newsworthy

events, there are four other, more specific pragmatic characteristics that are required for a story to receive much coverage. A story must be inoffensive or at least not blatantly offensive. Sometimes such concerns about taste keep a story from receiving coverage it would otherwise have. For example, the press was very slow to pick up on reporting on the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, in part because they balked at mentioning the most common way to acquire the disease, namely, anal intercourse (Meyer, 1990). After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the U.S. press only very cautiously addressed the issues of how U.S. foreign policy might have contributed to a climate

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spawning radical Islamic terrorism. Mainstream media concluded that most of the country did not want to hear that our policies might be at least partially responsible for those horrible events.

Credibility . Second, a serious story must be perceived as credible. An occurrence so bizarre that readers or viewers would not believe it is less likely to be reported, at least by the mainstream press (Meyer, 1990). Although this requirement may sometimes have the salutary effect of weeding out tabloid-style oddities such as Elvis sightings at K-Mart, it may have a less benign effect, such as when news media self-censor a story that they do not believe their public would accept or want to hear, such as a report that a very popular and respected leader has been involved in corruption.

“Sound Bites.” Third, a story must be packageable in small pieces, fit for

a 45-second TV news story or a short piece in the newspaper. A story that fits this packaging demand is much more likely to receive coverage than one that does not. The importance of this sound bite requirement is often underappreciated by those wishing their work would receive more coverage, such as scientists and others less than skilled in explaining their work to journalists in small, easy-to-digest pieces. Although the sound bite is often seen as a creation of television, some have argued that the pithy sound bite, whether or not it was actually uttered by its supposed author, has actually been with us for a long time (Wernick, 1996). For example, Louis XIV’s “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”), Julius Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), or Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here” have a lot in common with Ronald Reagan’s “Just say no” to drugs or George W.Bush’s “the axis of evil” reference to nations harboring terrorists or making weapons of mass destruction. The size of these bites has been decreasing; the average length of a TV news story about a U.S. Presidential election campaign declined from 43 seconds in 1968 to 9 seconds in 1988 (Hallin, 1992). Although television news deals in very short pieces, some media offer alternatives. In the case of newspapers, the trend over the last century has been to print longer stories with more interpretation, relative to pure reporting of the facts (Barnhurst & Mutz, 1997).

A final secondary characteristic of newsworthiness is the local hook, the connection of the story to the community of the reader, viewers, or listeners. At the local level, a newspaper or TV/radio station will

The Local Hook.

be much more likely to cover a national or international event if it has a local angle (e.g., a local resident caught in a foreign uprising, the closing of a local plant because of Mexican economic policy). On a national level, the hook in the United States may be a current policy debate in Washington or the

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downplayed or missed altogether because of the lack of an obvious local hook. U.S. media in particular are notorious for extensive foreign coverage during an immediate crisis, but very little before or after. Consequently, for the average person some crises seem to emerge suddenly out of nowhere, because they have not been aware of some smoldering issues. Also, after the immediate crisis, the all-important follow-up period receives little coverage. For example, the Afghanistan invasion of Fall 2001 to oust the Taliban regime received extensive coverage, but the following period of “nation- building” did not. The press had moved on to preparations for invading Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. After that was accomplished in March-April 2003, the protracted and challenging aftermath almost dropped off the radar screen. See Box 7.3 for an extended example of American news coverage from the same part of the world a generation earlier.

BOX 7.3