Crying Wolf: Scientific False Alarms and Defensive Journalism in Coverage of “Doomsday Asteroids”

Abstract

News coverage of “doomsday” asteroids and comets offers a telling insight into tensions surrounding the reportage of many modern risks. This study of press coverage in the U.S. and Britain discusses differing concepts of uncertainty held by journalists and scientists, and explores the defensive maneuvers that failure of prediction prompts in both communities—strategies that have a significant effect on the news of global threats consumed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Notes

1. The base sample consisted of the following newspapers: (U.S.) Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. (U.K.) Independent, Guardian, Times, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. Other newspapers, including The Sun and Daily Mirror from Britain, were netted during computer searches centering on key moments in the coverage of NEOs. This facilitated the widest possible view of the press response, as well as ensuring that influential newspapers that could not be included in the main sample due to the limitations of the Lexus Nexus database were not entirely excluded from analysis. Note that the database carries no page numbers for The Sun or Times, although in the latter case the section in which the article appears is indicated.

2. I have, in a separate but related study, examined coverage of the NEO phenomenon in America's supermarket tabloids. While it would be inappropriate to embark on a description of the results here, it is perhaps worth noting that the source of cultural authority appealed to in this coverage, the primary definers used, and manner in which the narrative was constructed and validated offered clear differences between these publications and their mainstream counterparts.