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Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Can we really say that this blurb represents “the news media?”
Some of the news media strives for detail and accuracy. I see them at the space press conferences all the time, and I doubt that those reporters have anything in common with whomever headlines blurbs for a TV station.
Point taken. I see dispassionate reporting all around me: The Economist, NY Times, WaPo, NPR, BBC. It’s probably truer to paint broadcast cable networks with the brush of supermarket tabloids rather than discolor everything in print or broadcast.