This is an invitation to the campus community to come to our first
spring semester Sigma Xi brown bag lunch (bring your own) today, Monday
Jan.24 at 12:00 in Grote Hall Rm.420.  Dr. David Sachsman, holder of the
West Chair of Excellence and Prof. of Communication, will give an
informal presentation on the nature of reporting on environmental risk
factors.  An abstract follows:

How do environment reporters in California (2004) and the Pacific
Northwest (2002) compare with their counterparts in the South
(2002-2003), the Mountain West (2001), and New England (2000)?  While
some regional differences were identified, the reporters' responses
showed striking similarities in their handling of risk assessment.
Most reporters said they consider the risk assessment angle - often
only sometimes, but consider it nonetheless -- when writing
environmental stories.  Although many believe that environmental
stories involve other coverage angles (such as government, business,
and human interest) more frequently than risk, more than half of the
environment reporters in all five areas are conscious of risk
assessment as an environmental angle, many more than might have been
true in the past.

How well do journalists cover environmental risk?  While more than 70
percent of the environment reporters in all five areas disagreed with
the statement that environmental journalists generally have overblown
environmental risks, unduly alarming the public, more than half agreed
that environmental journalists generally concentrate far too much on
problems and pollution, rather than writing stories to help the public
understand research or complex issues.

These are the findings of the fourth and fifth parts of a nationwide
series of studies in which the researchers proceeded region-by-region
collecting baseline data by interviewing newspaper and television
environment reporters.  Given the consistency of the findings in the
five different geographical areas studied to date, it is possible to
hypothesize that the results obtained so far generally reflect national
rather than regional trends.


Dr. Robert L. Marlowe, Profesor of Physics
Dept. of Physics, Geology and Astronomy #2352
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Chattanooga, TN 37403-2598
office: (423)425-4513  Fax: (423)425-4683