Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: A False Balance? Exemplars, Affect, and Media Coverage of Controversial Risk

一个突出的新闻规范是在报道有争议的风险问题时提供平衡，即使两种风险解释之间的科学证据和支持明显不平衡。然而，虽然记者对一个有争议的话题提出了两个方面，但他们对情感范例（带有引发情绪反应的说明文字的图片）的使用可能是不平衡的，例如只将一个范例用于一种风险解释。迄今为止，研究发现，情感反应可以告知风险，导致更多的风险相关信息的回忆，以及显著偏见人们对风险的严重性，频率和概率的看法，使他们的看法与风险管理者，科学家和其他专家的看法有很大不同。然而，这些研究都是在片面的信息和与争议性风险无关的故事背景下进行的。本文通过调查记者和测试旨在提高读者理解的信息策略，研究新闻报道在扭曲人们对有争议的风险话题的风险感知方面的潜在作用。研究人员假设，对于证据只支持双面新闻文章的一面的风险争议，不均匀地放置负面影响诱导范例可能会导致人们主要回忆起证据很少或没有证据支持的一面。这一点很重要，因为那些认为自己正在就风险争议发表一篇“平衡文章”的记者，可能会在不知不觉中影响他们的读者，使他们在很大程度上只处理和回忆双面信息的一面。此外，读者回忆这些信息的容易程度（即，可用性启发式）可能会影响他们的风险感知，使其与专家的估计有很大的不同。通过检查人们风险感知扭曲的潜在来源，并测试信息策略以改善这些感知扭曲，该研究提供了经验丰富的信息策略，不仅有助于风险管理者和卫生官员，而且还开启了关于可能误导受众风险的新闻实践的重要讨论。

A prominent journalistic norm is to provide balance when reporting on controversial risk issues, even when scientific evidence and support between two risk interpretations is significantly uneven. While journalists present two sides of a controversial topic, howeever, their use of affective exemplars (pictures with captions that provoke an emotional response) may be uneven, such as placing an exemplar to only one risk interpretation. To date, studies have found that affective reactions can inform on risk, lead to greater recall of risk-related information, as well as significantly bias peoples' perception of risk severity, frequency, and probability, such that their perceptions differ greatly from those of risk managers, scientists, and other experts. Such studies, however, have been done in the context of one-sided messages and stories unrelated to controversial risk. This proposal investigates the potential role news reporting plays in distorting people's risk perception surrounding controversial risk topics by surveying journalists and testing message strategies intended to improve readers' understanding. The researchers hypothesize that for risk controversies where the evidence supports only one side of a two-sided news article, uneven placement of a negative affect-inducing exemplar might lead people to primarily recall the side that is supported by little or no evidence. This is important because journalists who believe they are presenting a "balanced article" on a risk controversy might unknowingly influence their readers to largely process and recall only one side of a two-sided message. Moreover, the ease with which readers recall such information (i.e., the availability heuristic) might influence their risk perception to greatly differ from expert estimates. By examining potential sources of distortions in people's risk perception and testing message strategies to improve these perceptual distortions, the research provides empirically informed message strategies that not only aid risk managers and health officials but also open up important discussions on journalism practices that potentially misinform audiences on risk.