NEWS ON TV LIVES ON FEAR UCLA STUDY CRITICIZES LOCAL BROADCAST FOCUS.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

Local television newscasts play up dramatic stories of violence and disaster - especially those that are visually compelling - distorting the public perception of actual safety risks, a University of California, Los Angeles, study released Friday says.

``The news formula says, 'If it bleeds, it leads,''' said David McArthur, the principal author of the study - the first of its kind. ``Our study showed that the lead story in news broadcasts tended not to be something having to do with death or injury, but the majority of the second stories did. It's a question of balance.''

The study also found that the content of television newscasts in Los Angeles skewed viewer perception of actual threats to life and limb, causing unwarranted anxiety over some risks while masking the danger of others.

``The primary focus of local news is on events with high visual intrigue, such as air crashes and homicides,'' said McArthur, an epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Medicine and adjunct associate professor at the UCLA School of Public Health.

``Stories about deaths and injuries with lesser visual content - suicides, falls, accidental poisoning - are rarely shown,'' he said.

News directors at KCBS-TV (Channel 2), KNBC (Channel 4), KCAL-TV (Channel 9) and KTTV (Channel 11) declined to comment or were not available.

``KNBC has not seen or reviewed the study to be issued by UCLA,'' the station said in a statement. ``The station cannot make a comment on the validity of the study, since it does not have the information necessary to understand the purpose of the study or what methodology was utilized to achieve the study results.''

The study, published in the December edition of the peer-reviewed Western Journal of Medicine, found that local TV newcasts from November 1996 to May 1997 reported that deaths due to fires, homicides, airplane crashes, natural and environmental factors drew 66 percent of the coverage while constituting just 31 percent of actual deaths.

In contrast, deaths due to motor vehicle crashes were portrayed about a third less than actually occurred, and all other causes of traumatic death - such as accidental poisoning, falls and suicide - were broadcast in a much lower proportion than actually occurred.

For instance, while 56 people died in falls, newscasts broadcast only 13 percent of them. Of the 129 people who died from accidental poisonings, newcasts only broadcast 4 percent.

Of 6,696 people hospitalized after falls, less than 1 percent made the TV news.

Meanwhile, 98 percent of the 307 deaths from homicides and assaults and 100 percent of the 16 deaths from fires were broadcast.

Philip Brice, news director of public television station KCET (Channel 28), said he spent 25 years as a reporter and news director at commercial television stations in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Dallas and he doesn't believe there is a mind-set in television newsrooms to ``scare people.''

``I think there is a sense that this is the way we've always done it and that's the way we'll continue doing it,'' Bruce said. ``It's kind of like feeding the monster of the newscast. Unfortunately, I think it has a negative impact on viewers.''

Critics of television news coverage point out the emphasis on local news, noting that ``teases'' of upcoming stories about crimes and fires deliberately delay the location of the incident, giving viewers the impression it could be just down the street.

``I have hated that forever,'' Bruce said. ``Here again, there is some consultant who told the station this is the way to keep the eyeballs on your channel awhile longer. It's unfortunate that you have a story that is teased and teased and when you get it it's only 15 seconds and the tease is longer than the story.''

Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, professor of communication and sociology at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have prompted a lot of debate over whether the media increase anxiety by exaggerating the risks that people face.

``But they don't look at the right risk factors, like falling in the tub,'' she said. ``A lot of these stories have to do with interpersonal violence and make people take actions like getting a security system in areas where they don't really need them.''

Such misinformation places additional demands on health care professionals to uncover and correct a variety of misunderstandings and misapprehensions by patients and families, especially when talking with younger children, McArthur said.

``A handful of news directors have offered 'family-friendly' news formats, with explicit guidelines about what forms of violence, injury and death should or should not be allowed to air,'' McArthur said. ``Self- censorship, however, raises complex problems in its own right and has not met with audience favor.''

``An alternative might be for the medical profession to help educate news broadcasters about the cause and frequencies of traumatic deaths and injuries,'' he said.

With the exception of a spike in the last year, crime rates in Los Angeles County and nationwide have been falling for years, but television stations continued to report that crime was people's No. 1 fear.

``The notion that crime has gone up or down is extremely hard for a viewer to judge after a steady diet of deaths and injuries showing up over and over again from night to night on the evening news,'' McArthur said.