The information explosion has only worsened the media’s biases by making information and images instantly available around the world. The video clip of a helicopter hovering above floodwaters as a man is plucked from the roof of a house or a tree is a staple of evening news broadcasts. The flood may be in New Zealand and the broadcast in Missouri, or the other way around, but the relevance of the event to the people watching is of little concern to the broadcaster. It’s exciting and that’s enough. Watching the evening news recently, I was shown a video of a riot in Athens. Apparently, students were protesting changes in “how universities are governed.” That tells me nothing, but it doesn’t matter because the words aren’t the point. The images are. Clouds of tear gas billowing, masked men hurling Molotovs, riot cops charging: It’s pure drama, and so it’s being shown to people for whom it is completely meaningless.
If this were unusual, it wouldn’t matter much. But it’s not unusual because there is always another flood, riot, car crash, house fire, or murder. That’s not because the societies we live in are awash in disaster. It’s that the societies we live in have a lot of people. The population of the United States is 300 million, the European Union 450 million, and Japan 127 million. These numbers alone ensure that rare events—even one-in-a-million events—will occur many times every day, making the wildly improbable perfectly routine. That’s true even in countries with relatively small populations, such as Canada (32 million people), Australia (20 million), the Netherlands (17 million), and New Zealand (4 million). It’s even true within the borders of cities like New York (8 million people), London (7.5 million), Toronto (4.6 million), and Chicago (2.8 million). As a result, editors and producers who put together the news have a bottomless supply of rare-but-dramatic deaths from which to choose. And that’s if they stick with the regional or national supply. Go international and every newspaper and broadcast can be turned into a parade of improbable tragedy. Remove all professional restraints—that is, the desire to portray reality as it actually is—and you get the freak show that has taken over much of the media: “The man who was tied up, stabbed several times during sex, and watched as the woman he was with drank his blood is speaking only to ABC 15!” announced the KNXV anchorman in Phoenix, Arizona. “You wouldn’t expect this type of thing is going to happen during sex,” the victim said with considerable understatement.
The skewed images of mortality presented by the media have two effects. As we saw earlier, it fills our memories with examples of dramatic causes of death while providing few examples of mundane killers—and so when Gut uses the Example Rule, it will tend to overestimate the risk of dramatic causes of death while underestimating others. It also showers the audience with emotional images that drive risk perceptions via the Good-Bad Rule—pushing Gut further in the same direction. As a result, it’s entirely predictable that people would tend to overestimate the risk of dramatic deaths caused by murder, fire, and car crashes while underestimating such undramatic killers as asthma, diabetes, and heart disease. And that’s what researchers consistently find.
But distorted coverage of causes of death is far from the sole failure in the media’s handling of risk. Another is failing to ask the question that is essential to understanding any risk: How likely is it?
“The cholesterol-lowering statin Crestor can cause dangerous muscle problems,” my morning newspaper told me in an article that rounded up revelations about prescription-drug health risks in 2005. “The birth control method Depo-Provera is linked to bone loss. The attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drug Strattera might make children want to hurt themselves. It’s enough to make you clear out your medicine cabinet.” The writer feels these drugs pose a significant risk and she is inviting me to share that conclusion. But this is all she wrote about these drugs, and telling me that something could happen actually tells me very little. As I sit at my desk typing this sentence, it is possible that a passenger jet will lose power in all four engines, plummet from the sky, and interrupt my work in spectacular fashion. It could happen. What matters far more is that the chance of it happening is so tiny I’d need a microscope to see it. I know that. It’s what allows me to conclude that I can safely ignore the risk and concentrate instead on finishing this paragraph. And yet news stories routinely say there is a possibility of something bad happening without providing a meaningful sense of how likely that bad thing is.
John Roche and Marc Muskavitch, biologists at Boston College, surveyed articles about West Nile virus that appeared in major North American newspapers in 2000. The year was significant. This exotic new threat first surfaced in New York City in the summer of 1999, and its rapid spread through the eastern states, and later across the border into Canada, pushed the needle of public concern into the red zone. A 2002 survey by the Pew Research Center of Washington, D.C., found that 70 percent of Americans said they followed the West Nile virus story “very” or “fairly” closely—only a little less than the 77 percent who said they were following preparations for the invasion of Iraq—even though this was a virus that had still not appeared in most of the United States.
Making this attention all the more remarkable is the fact that West Nile isn’t a particularly deadly virus. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 80 percent of those infected with the virus never experience even the slightest symptoms, while almost all the rest suffer nothing worse than a fever, nausea, and vomiting that will last somewhere between a few days and a few weeks. One in 150 infected with the virus develops severe symptoms, including high fever, disorientation, and paralysis, and most of these very unlucky people fully recover after several weeks—only about 3 to 15 percent die. But these basic facts were rarely put at the center of the news about West Nile. Instead, the focus was on a family struggling with the loss of a beloved mother or a victim whose pleasant walk in the woods ended in a wheelchair.
There were statistics to go with these sad stories, of course. Roche and Muskavitch found that almost 60 percent of articles cited the number of people sickened by the virus and 81 percent had data on deaths. But what do these sorts of numbers actually tell us about the risk? If I read that the virus has killed eighteen people (as it had by 2001), should I worry? It depends. If it is eighteen dead in a village of one hundred, I definitely should. But if it is eighteen in a city of one million people, the risk is slim. And if it is eighteen in a nation of 300 million—the population of the United States—it is almost nonexistent. After all, 875 Americans choked to death on the food they were eating in 2003, but people don’t break into a cold sweat before each meal. But Roche and Muskavitch’s survey found that 89 percent of the articles about West Nile virus had “no information whatsoever” about the population on which the statistics were based. So readers were informed that West Nile virus had killed some people and, in many articles, they were also introduced to a victim suffering horribly or to the family of someone killed by the disease, but there was nothing else. With only that information, Head is unable to figure out how great the risk is and whether it’s worth worrying about. But not Gut. It has all the evidence it needs to conclude that the risk is high.