Stop television unravelling your reality

This topic was created in the Politics forum by Qbone on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 and has 2 replies.

From New Scientist Print Edition.
Michael Bond
19 August 2006
BEWARE your TV. Depending on who you listen to, it makes you more violent, increases obesity and consumption of tobacco and alcohol, encourages risky sexual behaviour and leads to greater social isolation. If you still aren't convinced of the dangers, try this one: the way television covers current affairs so distorts your sense of reality and the risks you face that you end up living a fantasy life.
You may not realise it, but your ideas of the world and the decisions you make - how to travel, where to live - are heavily influenced by what you see on news programmes. Since they are a poor reflection of what's going on, you end up making poor judgements. People running governments are no exception: they pass policies based on false realities. This is not a neo-Luddite manifesto: there's plenty of research to back it up. First, though, why pick on television? Surely all media influence our picture of the world. True, but television is particularly potent: it is visual and direct, which makes it more likely to trigger an emotional response than newspapers or radio. And when we get emotional, we're less able to make sensible judgements about risks.
"We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press," says Nicholas Taleb, professor in the sciences of uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "We're too impressionable. The television media is destroying our probabilistic mapping of the world. If you watch a building burning on television, it's going to change your attitude towards that risk, no matter your intellectual sophistication."
Underlying this is a phenomenon known as the "availability heuristic", first identified in the 1970s by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. It describes how people base their predictions about the future more on the vividness and emotional impact of past events than on the probability of them happening again. So people rate their chances of dying in a plane crash higher after watching a news item about such an event.

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Unpublished research by Corinne Enright at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville found that Americans who watched media coverage of the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks not only thought another major attack in the US was more likely, they also suffered more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those who didn't. This psychological effect was noted in 2002 by William Schlenger, then at the Research Triangle Institute, North Carolina, who found the likelihood of someone suffering PTSD as a result of 9/11 increased with the number of hours of television coverage they watched (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 288, p 581).
For individuals, these effects really matter. They suffer unnecessary anxiety, and may waste money and time on avoiding or accounting for risks that are vanishingly small - paying for terrorism insurance, for example, or travelling by car instead of plane. It can also lead governments to make unwise policy decisions, such as funding anti-terrorism measures, when spending the money on improving car safety would save many more lives. We all worry about terrorism because it is often in the news - the alleged plot to blow up 12 aircraft travelling from London to the US has left many travellers thinking of little else. But consider this reality check: the number of Americans killed by terrorism since the late 1960s is roughly the same as the number killed by lightning.
So, with all around losing their heads, how do we ensure we keep ours? Governments could force TV channels to run warning notices on emotive news reports, or screen statistics to give people a more balanced picture. Call me old-fashioned, or (as a print journalist) biased, but you could take matters into your own hands and stop watching the news. Believe me, it feels a lot safer.
From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 19 August 2006, page 19
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125655.400.html
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