Japan, the Press and Lethal Rain

I'm going to Japan in a couple of months and am on the getting end of a lot of concern from my loved ones, and my liked ones.  And for their concern I am profoundly grateful.  Thank you all.  I dig love, and I dig concern from loved ones.  And, you know . . .
 
A concern of mine at the moment is the way some of the press is loving the Japanese catastrophe.  Fine, Press, get all huffy, but let me give you an example or two of the way some of the press is reveling in the chance to sell product.  The Reader no doubt could supply examples of her own.

Really?  I mean, REALLY?

Some of the press, as is unfortunately not rare enough, is selling fear.  No, it's not necessarily most of the press, but it's a lot of the press.  It seems that too many "news" outlets are afraid that worldwide concern over the plight of the Japanese and fear for its own safety will dwindle and people will stop buying newspapers to help them worry.  Potential readers will, they fear, turn their attention to something other than the earthquake, the tsunami, power outages and direct danger to the workers who are braving the radiation, and so we are treated to ever-changing fears and new and evolving fears of what the radiation is going to do to the Japanese and to you and me. They're selling it hard because they can.

That's right, we're buying it.  Literally, and not just the newspapers.  You've heard, I guess, that in many places supplies of potassium iodide are gone. So, in response to the panic the irresponsible press is selling us, we are self-medicating, apparently, even though the small chance that the chemical would be harmful hugely overshadows the essentially nonexistent threat of Japanese radiation to the health of the rest of the world.  I love the above "graphic" that shows you how afraid you ought to be.  Look at that yellow cloud!  If you want to go look outside your window right now so you can see the real thing, I'll wait.

. . . 

Welcome back. Actually, it's not the graphic that I love best.  My favorite piece of fearmongery is a headline I saw in the Australian publication Perth Now:  "Nuclear crisis:  Australians stranded in Japan as lethal rain looms."

Run away!!

Hmmmm, lethal rain.  Kind of makes you wish you were back in your parents' or grandparents' 1961 fallout shelter, doesn't it?  Tell, me, Perth Now, about this lethal rain and how it's going to turn Australian tourists in Japan into latter-day Godzillas.

Happily, Perth Now does explain its commercially promising alarm: the one use in the entire story of the word "rain" comes in this sentence, in paragraph number -- wait for it -- twenty-six: "Tokyo was in gridlock with reports thousands were trying to flee amid fears the wind would bring downpours of nuclear rain."

OK.  OK.  In an effort to safeguard the public's right to know, and incidentally to pick up some loose change to the great joy of the circulation department, Perth Now's headline editor, which I'm assuming this publication has something like, scans the article, and not finding anything sufficiently newsworthy in paragraphs 1-25, warns us in this informative headline that traffic in Tokyo is heavier than usual "amid fears" that the winds would shift suddenly around to the northeast, glom onto the radioactivity, and dump it as "lethal rain" in Tokyo, thus endangering the unsuspecting Australian tourists.

See?  Proof!  It IS looming!!!!!!

It's the "amid fears" that I particularly love.  "Amid" means, I don't know, that Tokyo traffic is in gridlock for some reason and that one or more of the locked gridians are afraid (the "fears" that the reporter has discovered, somehow) that the rain contains --what? -- something lethal. Bad, anyway.

So the headline editor converts this intuition about what's causing the gridlock into the positive statement, "lethal rain looms."  Yes, it's science on a par with a uoija board, but it's presumably good news for Perth Now's shareholders.

OK, I don't really know Perth Now.  Maybe it's Perth's tawdriest tabloid, but although it's the worst example I've seen of dishing fake pain from an ocean of real pain, you've seen a bunch of stuff nearly as bad and so have I.

Note -- Since posting the rest of this, I found something called the Journalism Wall of Shame, which has a long, long list of mostly fear-mongering, often shoddy and, in may cases, hugely insensitive stories filed by, in some cases, otherwise reputable journalists.  I'd note that Perth Now's "lethal rain looms" entry was among them.  Interestingly, it rated only a 9 out of 10 on the bad journalism scale -- there were several that got the full 10.

Hey, it happened to Spiderman

And, hey, while we're on the subject, let's talk about lethality, because I think fear that's floating around is mostly fear of lethality-related radiation.  I don't think most of us really are afraid of turning into Godzilla.  Or, you know, being bitten by a radioactive ballerina and turning into a ballerina.  I think people tend to fear, radiationally speaking, what they think of generally as lethality.

Here's a chart that puts it all in perspective.  It's essentially logarithmic, so it's a little tough to understand at first, as far as relative danger of things such as eating bananas and living in a brick building for a year.  But look at it carefully and you'll see what constitutes and what does not constitute danger.  And if the chart is anywhere near accurate, living in Tokyo does not constitute danger, other than, you know, the possibility of subway gas attacks.  But that was a long time ago.

I for one am still planning my trip to Japan, without any radiation-related concern for myself, though in my constant search for something to feel guilty about I do worry about how my presence may add to some current Japanese burden. And I'm not taking potassium iodide with me.  If you worry about this national calamity and its victims, instead of buying these silly newspapers or hoarding potassium iodide, you can really help in other ways.  Click on the Red Cross logo for some of the ways.

頑張って -- let's all do our best.

Oh right, and this is theoretically a knitting blog, so also, you know, knitting.