Television viewing and public perceptions of hazards to life

Previous research on public perceptions of lethal or hazardous events have often cited the media as possible causes of inaccurate judgments of the frequencies with which such events are assumed to occur. No attempts have been made empirically to assess relationships between media usage and these perceptions however. A study is reported in which a representative sample from one region of Britain was asked to estimate the likelihood of personal risk from a number of hazards which were then related to how much television, and in particular, television news and documentaries they watched. Results showed that in the presence of controls for sex, age and socio-economic class, the overall amount of viewing, but not of news or documentary viewing in particular, was related to perceptions of personal risk on just four hazards to life out of a list of twelve. Heavy television viewers more often perceived higher risk from lightning, flooding and terrorist bomb attacks than did light television viewers, and medium viewers most often perceived higher risk from cancer. On this evidence it appears that aspects of television viewing are only sporadically related to public perceptions of hazards to life, and that viewing of news and documentary is unrelated to such perceptions.