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TELLING EPORTERS ABOUT Dealing with reporters needn't be the least agreeable part of the job. PETER M. SANDMAN Ithough I hate to admit it, risk communication is a simpler field than risk assessment or risk management. It just isn't that hard to understand how journalists and nontechnical peo- ple think about risk. But it is cru- cial to understand. In fact not mastering the rudiments of risk communication has led a lot of smart people to make a lot of fool- ish choices. Much depends on whether you think risk communication is a job that can safely be left to techni- cians-public relations staff, com- munity affairs officers-or whether you believe it must become an in- tegral part of risk management. My main goal is for environmental protection commissioners and plant managers to read what I have to say, not merely pass it along to the public relations office. That temptation is almost over- whelming, I know. Dealing with the media seems in so many ways the least pleasant, least controlla- ble, least fair part of a decision- maker's work. Most risk managers, I suspect, spend a good deal of time hoping the media will go away and 36 CoIV1l.ENGINEERING 0885-7024/8&D008-0038/501.00+15c per page

leave them to do their jobs in peace. But since they won't, the next best rhing is to understand better why they won't, how they are likely to react to what you have to say, and what you might want to say differently next time. • Ent,ironmental risk is not a big storv The mass media are not especially interested in environmental risk. Reporters do care whether or not an environmental situation is risky; that's what makes it news- worthy. But once the possibility of hazard is established, the focus turns to other matters: how did the prohlem happen, who is re- spon<ihle for cleaning it up, hov.• much will it cost? Assessing the ex- tent of the risk strikes most jour- nalists as an academic exercise. The reporter's job is news, not ed- ucation. And the news is the risky thing that has happened, not the difficult determination of how riskt• it actually is. The typical news story on envi- ronmental risk touches on risk it- self, while it dicells on more news- worthy matters. In 1985, newspa- per editors in New Jersey were asked to submit examples of their best reporting on environmental risk, and the articles were analyzed paragraph by paragraph. Only 32% of the paragraphs dealt at all with risk. Nearly half of the risk paragraphs, moreover, focused on whether a substance assumed to be risky was or was not present, leav- ing only 1796 ' of the paragraphs to deal directly with riskiness itself. In a parallel study, reporters were asked to specify which information they %sould need most urgently in covering an environmental risk emergency. 1\9ost reporters chose the basic risk information, saving the details for a possible second day scory. What happened, how it happ:ned, .vho's to blame and what the authorities are doing about it all command more jour- nalistic attention than toxicity during an environmental crisis. • Poli'tics is more neu-sworth-v than science The media's reluctance to focus on risk for more than a paragraph or two might be less of problem if that paragraph or two were a care- ful summary of the scientific evi- dence. It seldom is. In fact, the media are especially disinclined to cover the science of risk. Most of the paragraphs devoted to risk in the New Jersey study consisted of unsupported opinion-someone asserting or denying the risk with- out documentation. Only 4.2% of the paragraphs (24% of the risk paragraphs) took an intermediate or mixed or tentative position on the extent of risk. And only a handful of the articles told the readers what standard (if any) ex- isted for the hazard in question, much less the status of research and technical debate surrounding the standard. Trying to interest journalists in the abstract issues of environmen- tal risk assessment is tough; ab- stract issues are not the meat of journalism. Yet the public needs to understand abstractions like the uncertainty of risk assessments, the impossibility of zero risk, the de- batable assumptions underlying dose-response curves and animal tests. Where possible, it helps to embed some of these concepts in your comments on hot breaking stories. • Reporters cover viewpoints, not "truths" For science, objectivity is tenta- tiveness and adherence to evi- dence in the search for truth. For journalism, objectivity is balance. In the epistemology of journalism, there is no truth (or at least no way to determine truth); there.are only conflicting claims, to be cov- ered as fairly as posssible, thus tossing the hot potato of truth into the lap of the audience. Imagine a scale from 0 to 10 of all possible positions on an issue. Typically, reporters give short shrift to 0, 1, 9 and 10; these views are too extreme to be credible. Re- porters may also pay relatively lit- tle attention to 4, 5 and 6; these positions are too wishy-washy to make good copy. Most of the news, then, consists of 2's and 3's and 7's and 8's, in alternating paragraphs if the issue is hot, otherwise in sep- arate stories as each side creates and dominates its own news events. Objectivity to the journal- ist thus means giving both sides their chance, and reporting accu- rately what they had to say. It does not mean filling in the uninterest- ing middle, and it certainly does not mean figuring out who is right. If a risk story is developing and you have a perspective that you feel has not been well covered, don't wait to be called-you won't be. Reporters are busy chasing after the sources they have to talk to, and listening to the sources who want to talk to them. Rather than suffer in silence, be- come one of the relatively few ex- perts who keep newsroom tele- phone numbers in their rolodexes. You will find reporters amazingly willing to listen, to put your num- ber in their rolodexes, to cover your point of view along with all the others. Insofar as you can, try to be a 3 or a 7-that is, a credible exponent of an identifiable view- point. Don't let yourself be pushed to a position that's not yours, of course, but recognize that journal- ism doesn't trust 0's and 10's and has little use for 5's. Although journalists tend not to believe in Truth-with-a-capital-T, they believe fervently in facts. Never lie to a reporter. Never guess. If you don't know, say you don't know. If you know but can't tell, say you can't tell and explain why. • The risk story is usually simplified to a dichotomv The media see environmental risk as a dichotomy; either the situa- tion is hazardous or it is safe. This is in part because journalism di- chotomizes all issues into sides to be balanced. But there are other reasons for dichotornizing risk. (1) It is difficult to find space for com- plex, nuanced, intermediate posi- tions in a typical news story, say 40 seconds on televesion or 15 short paragraphs in a newspaper. (2) Virtually everyone outside his or her own field prefers simplicity to complexity, precision to approxi- mation, and certainty to tentative- ness. (3) Most of the "bottom lines" of journalism are dichoto- mies-the chemical release is either legal or illegal, people either evac- uate or stay, the incinerator is either built or not built. Like risk managers, the general public is usually asked to make yes-or-no decisions, and journalists are not wrong to want to offer informa- tion in that form. If you want to fight the journal- istic tendency to, dichotomize, fight it explicitly, asserting that the is- sue is not "risky or not" but "how risky." Recognizing that interme- diate positions on risk are intrinsi- cally less dramatic and more com- AUGUST 1988 37

plex than extreme positions, work especially hard to come up with simple, clear, interesting ways to express the middle view. Even so, expect reporters to insist on know- ing ",vhich side" you come down on with respect to the underlying policy dichotomy. • Reporters tr, to personali-e the risk ston, Perhaps nothing about media cov- erage of environmental risk so irri- tates rechnical sources as the me- dia's tendency to personalize. "Have you stopped drinking it yourself?" "Would you let your family live there?" Such questions fly in the face of the source's tech- nical training to keep oneself out of one's research, and they confuse the evidentiary requirements of policy decisions with the looser ones of personal choices. But for reporters, questions that personal- ize are the best questions. They do what their editors are constantly asking reporters to do: bring dead issues to life, make the abstract concrete, and focus on real people facing real decisions. Kno,xing that reporters will in- evitably ask personalizing ques- tions, he prepared with answers. It is often possible to answer with both one's personal viewsand one's policy recommendations, and then to explain the difference if there is one. Or come with col- leagues whose personal views are different, thus dramatizing the un- certainry of the data. If you are not willing (or not permitted) to ac- knowledge your own views, plan out some other way to personalize the risk, such as anecdotes, meta- phors, or specific advice for read- ers and viewers on the individual micro-risk level. • Claims of risk are usually more neacstcorthy than claims of safety On our 0-10 scale of risk asser- tions, the 3's and 7's share the bulk of the coverage, but they don't share it equally. Risk assertions re- ceive considerably more media at- tention than risk denials. Some- times, in fact, the denials get even less cov:rage than the intermedi- ate position, and reporters wind up "balancing" strong assertions of risk with bland statements that the degree cf risk is unknown. In the New Jersey study, the proportions were `-~8% risky, 18% not risky, and 24/c, mixed or intermediate. This is not bias, at least not as 38 CIVIL ENGINEERING journalism understands bias. It is built into the concept of newswor- thiness. If there were no allegation of risk, there would be no story. That something here might be risky is thus the core of the story; having covered it, the media give rather less attention to the coun- terbalancing notion that it might .not be risky. Among several factors that make risk more newsworthy than safety, the one closest to outright bias= but still distinguishable in the minds of journalists-is the me- dia's traditional skepticism toward those in authority. Most news is about powerful people, but along with the advantage of access gov- ernment and industry must endure the disadvantage of suspicion. En- vironmental groups, by contrast, receive less attention from the me- dia, but the attention is more con- sistently friendly. Sociologist Allan Mazur has found that public fearfulness about risky new technologies is propor- tional to the amount of coverage, not to its character. Media cover- age of environmental risk alerts the public to risks it was otherwise un- aware of, and thus increases the level of alarm even when coverage is balanced. This is not a rationale for avoid- ing the media. Even balanced me- dia coverage may not reliably lead to balanced public opinion, but balanced coverage is preferable to unbalanced coverage. And the coverage is most likely to be bal- anced when sources on all sides are actively trying to get covered. Peo- ple with knowledge and opinions to share perform a public service when they share them. • Reporters do their jobs with lim- ited expertise and time At all but the largest media, re- porters covering environmental risk are not likely to have any spe- cial preparation for the assign- ment. Specialized environmental reporters are the exception to the rule. Reporters covering an envi- ronmental emergency, for exam- ple, are mostly general assignment or police reporters. And reporters tend to be science-phobic in the first place: the typical college jour- nalism major takes only two sci- ence courses, and chooses those two carefully to avoid rigor. Though there are many excep- tions, the average reporter ap- proaches a technical story with trepidation (often hidden by professional bravado), expecting not to understand. It doesn't help that the average reporter covers and writes two or three stories a day. Here too there are exceptions, but most journal- ists are in a great hurry most of the time. They must make deadline not just on this story, but quite often on the story they will be covering after this one. Their goal, reasonably, is not to find out all that is known, but just to find out enough to write the story. COMMUNICATE It may help to train reporters about your field-but it will help a lot more to train yourself (and your colleagues and staff) about dealing with the media. Hiring effective public information specialists is also worthwhile, but reporters much prefer to talk to the people in charge. Especially during emer- gencies, press calls often go the boss and the expert instead of the press office, so the boss and the expert should know how to talk to reporters. Adequate communication skills are not so hard to develop. All it takes is a little understanding of how the media work, a little train- ing in dealing with reporters, and a little experience to smooth out the rough edges. Though you may never enjoy your contact with reporters, the risks of ducking the media are far greater than the risks of working with them. Every news story about environmental risk is a collabora- tion between the journalists work- ing on the story and the sources they talk to. There's not much you can do to change the nature of journalism or the performance of journalists. But you can under- stand them and figure out how to deal with them. By improving your own performance as a source, you can bring about a real improve- ment in media coverage of envi- ronmental risk. C Peter M. Sandman is the director of the environmental communications research program at Rutgers University. This arti- cle is extracted from his booklet, "Ex- plaining Environmental Risk," published by the TSCA Assistance Office, USEPA, Nov. 1986.