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Media Matters
Feb. 22, 2003
Waiting for... What? High Anxiety for Listeners and for NPR
By Jeffrey A. Dvorkin
Ombudsman
National Public Radio
Listeners are feeling distinctly nervous and who can blame them? Looming war in the Middle East... Code Orange alerts that may go up to Red... Homeland Security suggest helpful hints involving duct tape... and a winter storm that disrupts millions. The days' events and their implications seem to have both listeners and journalists on edge.
Weapons and Targets
A recent story by reporter Jon Hamilton went a long way to helping people cope with at least one major anxiety: the possibility of biological attack.
Hamilton's story aired on Morning Edition on February 14. It was about how ineffective most biological agents are and how difficult it would be to use them in an attack.
The report was extremely detailed in mentioning various bacilli and how limited they are in most cases in actually infecting people. Hamilton interviewed a number of scientists and a former weapons inspector. The story listed various toxic substances and agents -- plague, smallpox, ricin, botulinim toxin, and anthrax. The experts agreed: all are unreliable weapons and none are considered lethal to large numbers of people.
It was exactly the kind of reporting that NPR does well, questioning the assumptions around bio-terrorism and the report did much to allay fears about this issue.
NPR's 'Fear Factor'
But there was one line in the report that referred to the anthrax attacks. It caused some listeners to react angrily:
Mr. FRANZ: Five people died, and that was a tragedy, but with the amount of material that they had of the quality that it was,
I think a lot more people could have died had they done it in different ways, for example.
HAMILTON: Like putting them into the ventilation ducts at the subway system or a shopping mall. Even then, Franz says, terrorists using anthrax spores would not threaten an entire city.
Listener Lynn Lewis was appalled. She called from California to berate NPR for allowing that to be part of the story. Ms. Lewis said she was driving with her school age children and said that she and her children were deeply upset by hearing the "terrorist suggestion," as she put it.
And this e-mail from Roy Webb:
I was disappointed to hear NPR give in this morning to
the fear-mongering that is sweeping the rest of the
media in your story on Morning Edition (2/14/03) on
terror hysteria... I remain disappointed but still hopeful.
Solid Information
I thought Jon Hamilton's report was filled with solid and important information. It debunked a lot of the hysteria around bio-warfare and explained in good scientific terms why we need to be ever-skeptical about rumors of impending disaster.
But I agree with the listeners that including information about putting toxic material into ventilation systems was less necessary. It was not relevant to the story. It also frightened the daylights out of many people. It pointed out an important rule in radio writing: don't put anything in the middle of a script that is so compelling that it stops the listeners from paying attention to the rest of the report.
It's doubtful that terrorists are actually listening to NPR for suggestions about how next to proceed. There is the oft-cited danger that some idiot will engage in a copy-cat crime, contributing to what behavioral scientists call "violence contagion." Recent studies of news reporting and "copy-cat crime" in Germany and Hungary confirm this trend.
The effect of this report on many listeners was undeniable.
More Fear Than Curiosity
Some listeners were so shocked by this information that they began to think about the implications of that line in the story. That meant whatever else Jon Hamilton had to say (and the rest of his report was also valuable), they stopped listening because their fear overcame their curiosity.
NPR's journalism should be guided by what is both informative and socially useful to the most number of people. Sometimes that means reporting ideas that may make people concerned -- even nervous. At the same time, NPR needs to be more judicious in figuring out which facts to report -- and which to edit out.
Listeners may contact me at 202-513-3246 or at ombudsman@npr.org.
Jeffrey Dvorkin
NPR Ombudsman
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