Does news embellishment shock you? Did you rush out to buy salt and baby formula?
Media outlets are commercial entities.
In the age of commercialism, their first responsibility is to their stakeholders. It is to protect their commercial interests, not journalism ethics. It’s been that way for a hundred years.
Most people don’t read the whole story.
Most only read the headlines and no more. This is normal, I do it often. These days people don’t have the attention span nor the time to read the whole thing every time. Media knows this, and exploits this human behavior weakness.
There is a big difference between data and information.
Data points are just simple facts, information is what is useful. While both are “level 7″, but few bother to explain there are big differences between the incidences. While major media outlets don’t dare giving out inaccurate data, but that does not stop them from giving false impressions. The level was changed from 5 to 7, but did you know that situation at the power plant is no worse then 2 weeks ago? Did you know the rate of radio active materiel release is decreasing? Did you know the population density of Fukushima area is much lower then that of Chernobyl?
While all nuclear event are serious, but the media has failed at providing timely and proper context and scale.
IAEA makes no comparison with Chernobyl, the media did this to attract reader/viewers. Shocking headlines increase sales. Few mentioned the amount of radiative material release at Fukushima is calculated at 5-10% of Chernobyl.
The main factors for level 7, is because there is concentration of reactors at the site. Individually which of the troubled reactors would still be at level 5.
To give you a better sense of scale, if the same event happened in the nuclear plant closest to HK. HK would still be outside the effected area by a 100% margin. The distant between Fukushima and Tokyo is 6 times greater.
In an interview with Dr Robert Peter Gale, who lead the international medical team responding to Chernobyl, said that at the current rate of the nuclear crisis in Japan, there would be few, if any, thyroid cancer cases. He estimated an increase of 200 to 1,500 cancer cases combine over the next 50 years. In Chernobyl, there were 6,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer alone.
