Chernobyl – The U.S. media’s slant

In international news, first impressions usually are lasting ones. The impressions about the Chernobyl tragedy, given currency by the news media and most likely to linger for many Americans, are that a similar nuclear disaster could not happen in the United States and that the affair was further evidence that the Kremlin cannot be trusted to carry out a nuclear arms agreement. Yet a sampling of early crisis coverage poses the troubling possibility that these impressions were the product of a Cold War journalistic rush to judgment rather than the result of sound news practice in a situation that demanded more than the usual prudence.

Of course, the Soviets’ failure to promptly warn neighbouring countries invited suspicion. And clearly the media’s job was severely complicated by a news vacuum created by the Soviet’ Union’s grudging release of only meagre information after the initial announcement, although it is still not clear how much the Soviets knew early on or when they knew it. An official at a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) briefing on May 8 concluded: ‘It is most likely that the Soviets do not yet know with certainty the actual sequence of events. This is similar to our knowledge of the sequence of events at TMI-2 within the first week or so after the accident.’

Still, at least for those concerned about a better understanding of both the Soviet Union and nuclear matters, the Kremlin’s behaviour cannot justify the news media’s rush to fill the information void with rumour and an uncritical presentation of the views of the Reagan Administration and the nuclear power industry.

Media speculation

The most disturbing aspect of U.S. press coverage was the willingness to give currency to speculation about casualties and thereby to charge, implicitly or explicitly, that the Soviets were trying to cover up the true death toll. An egregious example of such irresponsibility was a New York Post front page, whose headlines screamed, ‘MASS GRAVE - 15,000 Reported Buried in Nuke Disposal Site’, a report that relied on nothing more than a Ukrainian weekly in New Jersey.(1)

Perhaps an even more serious lapse, given its prestige and number of clients throughout the United States, was United Press International’s handling of the death toll. Its report of 2,000 deaths received wide play, and the wire service did not retract its story until almost a month later. The report was based wholly on the word of a single unidentified source in Kiev whose story could not be confirmed.

Several major news organizations – including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and the three television networks – exercised varying degrees of caution in using the figure of 2,000 supposed dead but used it nevertheless. It is doubtful that caveats about lack of confirmation counted for much in the superheated atmosphere. The Soviet announcement that two had been killed in the initial accident was all but dismissed by the news media.

U.S. government sources dominated the news. For instance, prominent play was given to Kenneth Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who called the official Soviet statement regarding casualties ‘frankly preposterous’, and Secretary of State George Shultz, who said he would ‘bet $10’ that the deaths were ‘far in excess’ of the figures given by the Soviets. The press can be expected to report what prominent members of the Administration have to say, but journalists did not challenge these and other assertions about Chernobyl, nor were these officials pressed for hard evidence despite their obvious bias. Coverage gave little sign of a journalistic hunt for contrary views.

Ironically, the initial Soviet statements turned out to be largely correct on a number of significant concerns – for example, the number of casualties, the number of reactors on fire, and whether the fire had been contained – while those of the Reagan Administration, which were taken by journalists at face value, proved not to be. Yet elements of the national press were all too quick to echo the Administration’s position that the whole affair demonstrated that negotiating arms control with the Soviets was senseless because they could not be trusted to tell the truth on nuclear matters.

New York Times intoned in a May 1 editorial: ‘Gorbachev cannot win confidence in his pledges to reduce nuclear weapons if he forfeits his neighbours’ trust over the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.’ U.S. journalists frequently erased the distinctions between verifying nuclear weapons treaties, with all of the technical safeguards that such schemes have to provide, and the slow release of information by the Soviets about a totally unexpected explosion at a civilian nuclear plant-a situation for which no treaty obligations currently exist.

Media manipulation

The U.S. nuclear industry seems to have made a major effort to use the press to distance itself from the Soviet accident, apparently in order to preserve deregulation gains achieved under the Reagan Administration. The New York Times, belatedly but to its credit, pointed out some three weeks after the accident: ‘Nuclear proponents and industry officials have tried to minimize Chernobyl’s relevance to American power plant operation by contending that American units have better features.’ The article quoted a mailing to reporters from the Atomic Industrial Forum as flatly stating that Chernobyl had no containment structure, and cited industry-sponsored advertisements claiming that many Soviet reactors-including those at Chernobyl- lack the steel and reinforced-concrete containment structures common to U.S. reactors.(2)

Similar views were advanced by spokespersons for the Electric Power Research Institute – Chernobyl ‘was not encased in a reinforced-concrete containment building, as is required of reactors in the United States’ and therefore ‘there was nothing to stop’ radioactivity escaping from the plant – and the Edison Electric Institute: ‘We have not and will not have a Chernobyl-type plant accident here.’(3)

At least during the early period of the crisis, there is evidence that the industry’s efforts were successful. For instance, the theme pushed by the industry that allegedly backward Soviet technology was the sole explanation for the accident at Chernobyl was caught in the April 30 editorial judgment of the New York Times: ‘The accident may reveal more about the Soviet Union than the hazards of nuclear power... Behind the Chernobyl setback may lie deeper faults of a weak technology and industrial base.’ While the editorial did carefully conclude with the observation that Americans are as vulnerable as Soviets to ‘technological disasters and human error’, its overall tone and that of other mainstream coverage was markedly less humble.

The impression conveyed by the news media during the early stages of the accident was that Americans had little to fear from a Chernobyl-like disaster. Virtually absent in news columns as well as editorials was the perspective that the real lesson to be learned from Chernobyl was the fallibility of complex technology, not Soviet backwardness.

In particular, editorial writers seemed quick to accept the industry’s contentions about the total lack of containment at Chernobyl. As early as April 30, the Los Angeles Times told readers: ‘Minimum safety standards... clearly have not been met in the Soviet Union, where most nuclear reactors – apparently including the ill-fated plant at Chernobyl – do not have containment structures of the sort that are almost universal outside Russia.’ A May 2 editorial in the San Jose Mercury News echoed these views with the conclusion that ‘the U.S.S.R. simply has not built safe reactors.’ According to the Mercury the Soviets ‘have been exposed as reckless with the atom.’

The possibility that the plant had some form of containment should have been immediately obvious to reporters and editors. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported the first day that, although older plants were often built without containment structures, the Soviets began adding them for newer nuclear plants in 1980, in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident.(4) Both papers furthermore reported that the four units at Chernobyl had been completed between 1977 and 1983. Unsure of which unit was involved or its construction date, the New York Times was careful to state that ‘it is not known’ at which of the Chernobyl reactors the accident had occurred nor whether it had containment.

Such caution, however, appeared to evaporate the following day, even though by this time the Times was able to report that the accident had occurred at the newest of the four reactors at the facility, which went into operation in 1983, and therefore – at least based on what was reported the day before – presumably had some form of containment.(5) Rather than pursuing this line of inquiry, the media opted to repeat the no-containment theme advanced by U.S. nuclear power advocates. Nor was it pointed out that, even if Chernobyl had no containment, the failure or bypass of such structures remains one of the most troubling potential aspects of severe accidents in U.S. reactors.

American minds had probably long since been made up on the question of containment by the time the New York Times reported on May 19, three weeks after the first story on the accident, that the reactor which exploded had a large containment structure of heavy steel and concrete, and ‘that at least some of this containment structure was designed to withstand pressures similar to those in many American reactors.’ The Times also reported that the stricken reactor ‘had more safety features and was closer to American reactor designs than Western experts had assumed’, and in fact ‘incorporated enough of the advanced safety features used in American reactors to raise questions... about the effectiveness of plant designs in the United States.’

Why this information took so long to surface in the national press is puzzling. Much of the material in the Times story, for instance, was revealed at the May 8 NRC briefing in a room packed with reporters, 11 days before the Times or other major news organizations finally ran its story. And two days before that briefing, NRC Commissioner James Asselstine had testified at a House hearing that Chernobyl indeed did have containment and that it was built to withstand greater pressure than some U.S. containments. Yet his disclosure received only passing mention in paragraphs 12 and 13 in a Wall Street journal article and barely surfaced elsewhere.(6)

In short, mainstream journalists first ignored the strong possibility apparent from day one of the crisis that Chernobyl might have containment, and then for whatever reasons continued to ignore the possibility even after NRC officials brought it to their attention. While uncertainty remains about the nature of containment at Chernobyl, it is clear that flat claims of ‘no containment’ were overreaching.

Them vs. us mentality

Throughout the early days of the Chernobyl story, U.S. journalism seemed determined to make the disaster into a morality tale about U.S. and Soviet cultures. Over and over, the accident was linked to the nature of Soviet society, the absence of debate, and state control of the press. Editorialists and commentators adopted a self-congratulatory tone, implying that the virtues of U.S. democracy – in particular a free press – made such a tragedy practically impossible in the United States. Journalists should have been alert to the possibility that they were being manipulated by those with a vested interest in portraying the Soviets in the worst possible light.

A number of news organizations eventually took a critical view of Chernobyl coverage, but the usual explanation for the media’s questionable behaviour during the crisis let journalists off with little more than a mild reproach. According to Newsweek: ‘For all the frenzy, the press was just obeying a natural law: journalism abhors a vacuum.’(7) Thus, Soviet secrecy was blamed for defective U.S. coverage of the Chernobyl accident.(8)

While journalism does indeed abhor vacuums, such an explanation avoids the question of how vacuums are to be filled, which is not a matter of nature but rather of choice. These choices may have had as much to do with a reflexive instinct to believe the worst of the Soviets as with a journalistic rush to fill a void.
First published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August/September 1986. Reprinted with permission.

Notes

1. The Post’s actions are recounted in ‘Did the Media Hype Chernobyl?’ Newsweek (May 26, 1986), p. 31.
2. Stuart Diamond, ‘Chernobyl Design Found to Include New Safety Plans’, New York Times, May 19, 1986.
3. Mitchel Benson, ‘Soviet Reactor to Contain Leak, Expert Says’, San Jose Mercury News, April 29, 1986; Diamond, op. cit.
4. Lee Dye and Larry B. Stammer, ‘Moscow Rated Damaged Plant Among Safest’, Los Angeles Times, April 29,1986, p. 1; Theodore Shabad, ‘Development of Nuclear Power a Consistently High Soviet Priority’, New York Times, April 29, 1986, p. A10.
5. Serge Schmemann, ‘Soviet, Reporting Atom Plant “Disaster”, Seeks Help Abroad to Fight Reactor Fire’, New York Times, April 30, 1986, p. 1.
6. John J. Fialka and Robert E. Taylor, ‘Soviets Say Confusion at Chernobyl Led to 36-Hour Delay in Evacuating People’, Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1986. The Chernobyl containment features and their design pressures were described in briefing materials prepared for the NRC commissioners by their staff in preparation for the congressional hearing. See Question and Answer C.4 in briefing paper dated May 5, 1986.
7. ‘Did the Media Hype Chernobyl?’
8. See, for example, Thomas B. Rosentiel, ‘Soviet Secrecy Blamed for Exaggerated American Reports on Chernobvl Disaster’. Los Angeles Times. May 10, 1986, p. 21.
William A. Dorman is a professor of journalism at California State University, Sacramento, and a research affiliate of the Adlai E. Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Daniel Hirsch is director of the Program on Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and serves on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission advisory panel examining problems associated with the potential for containment failure in U.S. reactors during severe accidents.