The Context of Risk Communication: The Mass Media

Abstract

Risk events can come to our attention in many ways, but the news media play a very important role in this respect. On any day, many more events occur than the media are able to report as news due to limitations of time, space, and technology. Therefore, the news media must select. According to the needs of the next client, the news is traced, collected, translated, edited, shortened or expanded, and transferred. At divers stations or filters in the process of news production, news information is being processed. These stations or filters could be journalists, correspondents, news agencies, and editorial boards of newspapers or other news media. In Figure 3.1, this process is schematized. After the final editorial process, the information about the news event is received by the public. The initial establishment that a particular event is news, depends on the journalist’s assessment of its news value. News value is mainly determined by the actuality of the event in a temporal, geographical, or psychological sense, and by the significance of the event. A radical event with long-lasting consequences for a large group of people has a high news value. Journalists, editors, and editorial boards of news media, constantly assess the news value of the events they are confronted with; the main question being Is this event important enough for my ‘customer’? This process of gate-keeping has been subjected to research quite often. Nevertheless, these studies only seem to allow the conclusion that the assessment of news value is highly personal and subjective.