March 10, 2003
Last week, a snowstorm dropped 20 cm. of snow on Toronto. There are several reasons why this occurred, two of them being that Toronto is in Canada, and it is now winter. Years ago, storms such as this one were ordinary occurrences; today, they are almost major disasters.
The wintry weather led off most media news broadcasts. Call-in shows, previously filled with discussions of the upcoming war with Iraq, now centred upon the weather. In a talk show on CFRB, a caller called in to say that during the storm, it took him an entire 10 minutes extra to get to work. Then he added that a couple of people called his workplace to say that they just couldn’t make it into work. Their reason--they had heard on the very same CFRB that it was just too bad outside to even attempt to get around.
There is no doubt that the severity and duration of the snowstorm did not match the media hype. And the way the media portrayed the storm, as a much more serious occurrence than it actually was, was not unusual. In his 1999 book, The Culture of Fear, U.S. sociology professor Barry Glassner found that the media, through its selective coverage of certain events, does create fears that result, not from the fact of those events, but from their portrayal in the media.
In the 1990s, crime rates in the United States decreased. Yet, the public’s perception was that crime, especially violent crime, was rising. This was due to the concentration of coverage of violent crime by the media who consistently apply their motto, "if it bleeds, it leads". A specific example of this media effect is in the phenomenon of so--called "killer kids". South of the border in the last few years there have been some highly publicized school shootings, many of them taking place in a relatively short period of time. It is not just the news coverage of these shootings that creates what appears to be a crisis. In addition to the hard news coverage, there are the talk shows. Experts flood the networks with the reasons why kids kill; everything from violent video games to a Republican in the White House. The saturation of this type of psychobabble, by experts who have never interviewed the participants and who have no personal knowledge of the individual incidents, leads to the perception in many viewers’ minds that some, if not the vast majority of high school students are mass murderers waiting to happen. Of course, the chance that a high school student will get struck by lightening is much greater than being shot by a classmate.
The media also contributes to creating crises by giving cutesy little names to some forms of activities. There is no doubt that motorists have occasionally gotten into fights with other motorists since the automobile was invented. The same is probably true for people who get into tussles and fights on planes. Yet, when these activities were categorized as road rage and air rage, the media went looking for these events to further illustrate what appears to be a new activity. A fight between motorists would take precedence in coverage over a bar fight, regardless of the seriousness of the injuries sustained or the cause of the fight. The "rage" would be covered not only to report upon the incident, but to provide proof that the road rage or air rage is a major problem. Rarely are statistics ever used in these types of stories to give a true picture.
So what should the media do, the next time 20 cm. of the white stuff falls on Toronto in the middle of winter? They should just let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.