News Media declared war against truth and against the victims of disaster

People's lives are on the line, as there are efforts to rush aid to vulnerable members of society. Some aid is seriously delayed due to bogus stories about the radiation risks.

Public policy is expensive, especially when it comes to figuring out how to be better prepared against similar disasters.  I am also seeing how Japanese imports are being blocked at foreign borders, thanks to misinformation about radiation.

News media should endeavor to report the truth, to help the helpers who seek to get relief aid to the vulnerable.

But instead, the news media is on a science fiction fantasy trip, describing their worst nightmares as pure speculation. People on the USA west coast are tooling up to protect against radiation coming across the Pacific from Japan, and I have seen lots of lovely maps speculating the path of this radiation, but it is all a fiction.  The only radiation risk so far, is inside the evacuation zone, and trivial rainfall contamination, where Japan tracing where that happening.

I have written about this in past posts, but here comes Crawford Kilian independently encountered this phenomenon thru his blog H5N1, which he uses to learn how the media report on diseases. And that in turn affects the political response to public-health issues. In the case of Japan, as with earlier outbreaks, the media have tended to go for scare stories, myths, and stereotypes. That in turn will lead to scare politics and misguided policy.  His article

“Shaky Coverage of Japan" provides a ton of links to news media stories which are bogus, spelling out what is bogus about them, from the mild lack of fact checking, to apparently racist against the Japanese.