Another element essential to good storytelling is vividness, in words or images, and good journalists constantly seek to inject it into their work. This has profound consequences for perceptions of risk.
“Mad cow disease” is the sort of short, vivid, punchy language that newspapers love, and not surprisingly the term was coined by a newspaper-man. David Brown of the Daily Telegraph realized the scientific name—bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—is dry and abstract and, as he later recalled in an interview, he wanted people to pay attention and demand something be done about the problem. “The title of the disease summed it up. It actually did a service. I have no conscience about calling it mad cow disease.” The label was indeed potent. A 2005 paper examining how the BSE crisis played out in France found that beef consumption dropped sharply when the French media used the “mad cow” label rather than BSE. To bolster those results, Marwan Sinaceur, Chip Heath, and Steve Cole—the first two professors at Stanford University, the last at UCLA— conducted a lab study that asked people to imagine they had just eaten beef and heard a news item about the disease. They found that those who heard the disease described as mad cow disease expressed more worry and a greater inclination to cut back on beef than those who were asked about bovine spongiform encephalopathy. This is the Good-Bad Rule at work. “The Mad Cow label caused them to rely more on their emotional reactions than they did when scientific labels were used,” the researchers wrote. “The results are consistent with dual-system theories in that although scientific labels did not eliminate the effect of emotion, they caused people to think more deliberatively. ” Gut jumped at the mention of mad cow disease, in other words, while bovine spongiform encephalopathy got Head to pay attention.
Even more than emotional language, the media adore bad news, so journalists often—contrary to the advice of the old song—accentuate the negative and eliminate the positive. In October 2007, Britain’s Independent ran a banner headline—“Not An Environment Scare Story”—above a grim article about the latest report from the United Nations Environment Program.The tone was justified, as the report contained documentation of worsening environmental trends. But as the UN’s own summary of the report noted in its first paragraph, the report also “salutes the real progress made in tackling some of the world’s most pressing environmental problem. ” There wasn’t a word about progress in the Independent’s account.
The same newspaper was even more tendentious when it reported on a 2006 survey of illicit drug prices in the United Kingdom conducted by the DrugScope charity. DrugScope’s own report opens with this sentence: “Despite a wealth of dubious media stories about cocaine flooding playgrounds, crack and heroin being easier to buy than takeaway pizzas and an explosion of cannabis smoking sparked by reclassification, a snapshot of average illicit drug prices in 20 towns and cities undertaken in July and August reveals prices have remained relatively stable in the last year.” The lead sentence of the Independent’s report on the survey was somewhat different: “The cost of drugs in many parts of Britain has plummeted in the past year, an authoritative study on the country’s booming industry in illegal substances has revealed. ” DrugScope also reported that “the forecasted crystal meth epidemic has failed to materialize and it was not considered a significant part of any of the 20 drug markets.” Predictably, this was not mentioned in the Independent article.
When the American Cancer Society released 2006 statistics showing overall cancer rates had declined in New York City and across the United States, the New York Post managed to turn this good news bad in a story headlined “Cancer Alarm.” “About 88,230 Big Apple residents were diagnosed with cancer this year,” read the first sentence, “and 35,600 died— many from preventable lung and prostate cancers, a new study shows.” Only in a single sentence of the third paragraph did the Post acknowledge, grudgingly, that the cancer rate—the statistic that really matters—had declined. It took similar creativity for the Toronto Star to find bad news in the Statistics Canada announcement that the life span of the average Canadian male had reached eighty years. After devoting a single sentence to this historic development, the reporter rushed on to the thrust of the rest of the article: “The bad news is these booming ranks of elderly Canadians could crash our health system.”
Scientists, particularly medical researchers, have long complained that the media favor studies that find a threat over those that don’t. Eager to test this observation empirically, doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto noticed that the March 20, 1991, edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association had back-to-back studies on the question of childhood cancers caused by radiation. The first study was positive—it showed a hazard existed. The second study was negative—it found no danger. Since the media routinely report on studies in JAMA, this was a perfect test of bias. In all, the researchers found nineteen articles related to the studies in newspapers. Nine mentioned only the study that found there is a danger. None reported only the study that found there isn’t a threat. Ten articles reported both—but in these, significantly more attention was given to the study that said there is a danger than to the one that said there isn’t.
As unfortunate as this bias may be, it is just as understandable as the tendency to prefer emotional stories over accurate data. “We don’t like bad news,” observes a character in a Margaret Atwood short story. “But we need it. We need to know about it in case it’s coming our way. Herd of deer in the meadow, heads down, grazing peacefully. Then woof woof—wild dogs in the woods. Heads up, ears forward. Prepare to flee!” It’s a primitive instinct. Our ancestors didn’t jump up and scan the horizon when someone said there were no lions in the vicinity, but a shout of “Lion!” got everyone’s attention. It’s the way we are wired, reporter and reader alike. A study by psychologists Michael Siegrist and George Cvetkovich found that when students at the University of Zurich were given new research on a health risk (a food coloring, electromagnetic fields), they considered the research more credible when it indicated there is a hazard than when it found no danger. “People have more confidence in studies with negative outcomes than in studies showing no risks,” the researchers concluded.
For the reporter, the natural bias for bad news is compounded by the difficulty of relating good news in the form of personal stories. How do you tell the story of a woman who doesn’t get breast cancer? The ex-con who obeys the law? The plane that makes a smooth landing right on schedule? “Postal Worker Satisfied with Life” isn’t much of a headline—unlike “Postal Worker Kills Eight,” which is bound for the front page.
It can even be a challenge to turn statistically representative examples of bad news into stories. Stories about serial killers may be fascinating, but the average criminal is a seventeen-year-old shoplifter, and stories about seventeen-year-old shoplifters will never be as interesting as stories about serial killers. As for the statistically representative victim of West Nile virus—no symptoms, no consequences—the writer has not been born who could make this story interesting to anyone but a statistician.