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Commercialization

The News Media Does Not Even Try To Understand Risk

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 3, 2014
Filed under

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “The News Media Does Not Even Try To Understand Risk”

  1. John Campbell says:
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    People don’t reliably compute risk.

    Never forget that this kind of myopia DOES sell papers and airtime.

    If there’s no in-built controversy, something has to be manufactured to keep us watching.

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    Lots of things that are misunderstood, including the notion of statistics/ chance. My own sense is the level of education in our country has been so degraded that shiny, flashy objects become two-second focal points.

  3. jon_downfromthetrees says:
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    Why look for news on TV? It’s tabloid broacasting tuned to make money. The SpaceShipTwo headlines are crafted to cater to preconceived biases. You don’t get return viewers or return clickers by challenging what people think they already know.

    People who want actual journalism and actual news need to find it for ourselves. That’s always been the case. Most of us have never cared enough to do that and expect, wrongly, to be force fed the news in a few minutes on TV, the car radio or Facebook.

    There’s little difference between the guy 50 years ago who got the daily paper but read only sports and the comics and the guy today who turns on cable.

  4. SpaceMunkie says:
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    The problem is that the first two are relate-able, most people can relate to the risk. Very few can relate to the last one.

  5. Kevin Hoover says:
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