Bill Kovach - Blur; How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload

Melanie Moyer first senses something is wrong when she arrives to pick up her father at the hospital.

At the nurses desk, she overhears a doctor telling people he has already sent his wife and children north to New England. If we start taking in all kinds of people, I dont want to have to worry about my family at home, he says.

Taking in all kinds of people from what, she wonders?

I got into the car and turned on the radio and started hearing that there was an incident at the plant, a nuclear power facility nearby, she recalls later.

Across town, Maureen Doherty first sees something on the TV news. I remember thinking I was going to die, she says later.

As word spreads, workers at the plant begin contacting family and friends to warn them that something very serious is wrong. Many, like the doctor Moyer overhears, advise their families and friends to assume the worst and react accordingly.

These people, in turn, begin e-mailing others about their plans to flee. Grainy cell phone images and video of emergency vehicles, worried officials, and panicked plant employees begin to appear on local TV and then on cable news. Experts, uninvolved but supposedly knowledgeable, are invited on the air to speculate on the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. Video clips from the movie The China Syndrome are played and go viral on YouTube.

The message, offered sometimes in apocalyptic terms and other times more cautiously, is that theres a problem in the reactor core, which threatens to spew radioactive particles into the atmosphere, turning a local electricity plant into an international nuclear nightmare. The entire mid-Atlantic region of the United States is at risk. Roughly a third of the U.S. population could be contaminated.

The blogosophere moves even faster than TV news and YouTube. Within moments, established bloggers begin to expound on the safety of nuclear power. Soon new blogs, including some by former plant employees, are launched and linked to by others. Within hours, competing blogs appear, some defending the role of nuclear power, and some of these include inside information. The plants owner also creates a blog. Then three sites appear that present themselves as independent information providers but in reality are controlled by political groups, including one by the nuclear power industry, and are designed to counteract the critics. Their backers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in keyword fees to make sure that in any Google or Yahoo search, these are the sites Americans would likely see.

The news on more-conventional news Web sites is fragmentary and often contradictory. The mix of messages is hard to sort through and depends on which site one visits and when.

On drive-time radio that afternoon, the nuclear event, still only a possible disaster, becomes a political wedge issue about power, the environment, and federal policy in the war of words among talk radio hosts on the left and the right. The same stylized talking points play out again on cable talk shows in prime time later that night. The message on cable news is particularly confusing. One channel seems to tilt toward the idea that the government is covering up the seriousness of the incident. A rival channel, in a manner equally hard to pin down but just as unmistakable, seems to infer that there is no incident at all and that the whole thing may be a rumor designed to destroy the U.S. nuclear power industry all over again, just as it was finally getting back on its feet after a generation of misguided and exaggerated claims about safety. A third cable channel seems to veer in both directions, inviting familiar political advocates along with various hazily identified experts to debate the meaning of the event that is unfolding.

As for print editions of newspapers (whose staffs are down by roughly 30 percent from ten years earlier) and for network news (where cuts in news gathering have been even steeper), they offer careful reportage but seem slow and out of stepappearing late in the day or the next morning.

The people around the nuclear site itself operate in still another world, buffeted by rumors electronic and in person that create randomly fragmented communities of information. One neighbor is convinced that a nuclear catastrophe is at hand, another that a minor incident has occurred. Others anxiously trying to weigh contradictory messages consider leaving the area but worry that could become deadlier than the nuclear threat if choked roads turn mass evacuation into mass hysteria.

Welcome to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident imagined in the age of the Internet.

This is not how the story played out. The reactor core of the nuclear power plant near Hershey, Pennsylvania, did overheat in 1979, but the incident occurred in a very different information world.

Melanie Moyer is real, and she did first hear about the accident at the hospital and then rushed to listen to her car radio. So is Maureen Doherty, who first learned about it on the local TV news. As they and people everywhere waited and watched, almost everything they learned about the incident was filtered through a mainstream news media at arguably the height of its prestige, trust, and influence in American history. On television, a handful of anchormen, whose networks did not expect their newscasts or their news divisions to make a profit, told the country what they knew without trying to dramatize for ratings. Newspapers, most of them flush with cash after vanquishing their rivals and becoming a monopoly in their markets, sent their reporters to nail down a single accurate account for that days edition. It was an industry that all but controlled the news, took that responsibility seriously, and by and large did not recognize its own shortcomings. As such, it tended to speak to the public with a tone of authoritative reassurance. It did not, generally, shout or even raise its voice to attract attention.

Though it did not know it, Three Mile Island would become one of the last great domestic emergencies the media covered before the age of cable news, the concept of the message of the day, the reinvention of the word spin, and the notion that mainstream media could be a slur. And what occurred showed how the gatekeepers of public knowledge could verify the news before publication or broadcast and help calm a panicky nation with facts.

The crisis began at about four A.M. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979. A valve in the plants cooling system got stuck in the open position, letting water that would have cooled the reactor leak out. Without the coolant, the reactor core began to overheat and the nuclear fuel pellets began to melt. At nine fifteen A.M. , the White House was notified. At eleven A.M. , plant officials ordered all nonessential personnel off the plants premises. With that, word of an event at the plant began to filter out through the surrounding community. Workers called family and friends and neighbors with the news, which sputtered through the grapevine, often growing ominously with retelling. By midday, helicopters hired by the plants owner, General Public Utilities Nuclear, and others from the U.S. Department of Energy could be seen circling above the plant, sampling the radioactivity in the atmosphere.