social science draft

After the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, media coverage of terrorist movement became one of the best selling issues in news industry. Many researcher started to examine whether the bad news have positive influences to the public. With the central question: Do crisis reports keep people informed or create excessive anxiety? Some scholars suggest that negative news create public awareness of crisis(Martin 180-193), help governments control the effect of a disaster, such as the spread of national disease (Meng and Berger 19-28). Thus, detailed crisis reports have positive influence to the public. Other scholars, however, question whether detailed negative converge is overemphasized. With a solid research, Michelle Slone and Anat Shoshani examine the effect on crisis reports and argue that overstate the horrifying details in news coverage will negatively affect viewers’ mental health. (Slone and Shoshani 535-542). Although public have the right to know the crisis, revealing horrifying details cause psychological harms to the public more than crisis itself.

Recent studies overturn the idea of beneficial impact on crisis reports. In 2003, Giora Keinan, Avi Sadeh, and Sefi Rosen conducted three types of questionnaires on more than five hundred people in Israel to observed media effect on terrorist acts. To examine the influence of media converge of terrorist, they collected participants’ response on their attitudes toward the media coverage of a terrorist act and their behavior after viewing the news report. The result shows that while consumers prefer to have coverage of terrorist movement, the willingness to read the report declined when it contain frightened details. Furthermore, horrifying and violent details create an overstate anxiety and damage viewers’ mental health (2003). In other words, expose to aggressive and horrifying coverage negatively affect viewers. Different studies in the field agreed with this statement and published theories with further research. In a similar research, Michelle Slone and Anat Shoshani confirm the idea that news coverage of terrorism arouses viewers’ anxiety and need certain intervention conditions to cope public fear (2006).

News coverage often viewed as information outlet that updates the latest crisis around the world, keep the public informed and be aware of the possible risks. In fact, due to the nature of news industry, news coverage report crisis with frightened details are that not necessary to reveal the issue, but to catch public attention. Although public has the right to know the crisis without any restriction, reports that overemphasized extremely intimidating and horrifying scenes raise excessive anxiety among public. Negative news are being exaggerated and labeled as “crisis” to draw viewers’ attention, such as regional gun shooting, robbery, abduction, and terrorist movement. In fact, most of the so-called crisis only affect on small region and with certain groups of people. Media coverage largely reports the hideous information makes public overstate the crisis. Despite the fact that top causes of death still find in heart diseases, cancers and car accidents (Ellis 2008), public are now more concern and distress about the crisis that are not likely to threaten their lives. Coverage of terrorism, while crucial for getting public’s awareness and pushing government to establish practicable resolution, extreme details block viewers to see a balance report. Specifically, such reports create unnecessary anxiety that damage public’s mental health.

In conclusion, although news coverage of crisis is needed, horrifying and violent details cause harms viewers’ mental health and should be avoided. Ethical code is needed in news coverage to prevent the potential of psychological injury on viewers. News industry needs to be cautious about reporting crisis issues in order that public can have moderate awareness without being scared.