Chernobyl

The Chernobyl disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, caused significant damage and had far-reaching consequences. The Soviet government initially tried to hide the incident and downplay its severity. It took over 20 years for the truth to come to light. The influence of governments on the press varies across different countries. In the United States, the government has less impact on the press due to press freedoms. However, in some countries, the press is controlled by the government and serves as a propaganda arm. Trustworthiness of the media depends on how responsibly they report information and their independence from the government. The media plays a crucial role in uncovering the truth and setting the agenda for public awareness. What is the cost of lying? It's not that we will mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon the hope of truth and contain ourselves with stories? This famous quote from HBO TV show, Chernobyl, guides us to uncover the truth under the water and summarizes the propositions of the whole project. Why do we need to find the truth? Hi everyone, my name is Lise and when you listen to this broadcast, it is April 26, 2024. It's the 38th anniversary of Chernobyl. This calamity has caused irrepeatable and irreversible damage to human history and even further become one of the reasons leading to the desegregation of the former Soviet Union. According to the United Nations, this was the most serious accident ever to occur in nuclear power industry. Most of you probably have heard this story or watching some documentaries about it. Before we dig into our biggest topic, let's just turn back time and quickly go through the incident itself. April 26, 1986. A regular night with a full moon. Everyone in the town was asleep with a few late night shift workers still awake. However, the nuclear station is still keeping the lights on. The theta explosion occurred at 1.23 a.m. during a routine maintenance check of the plant's electrical system. Operators went against safety protocols and shut down parts of the control system that were necessary to run the plant safely. The result was an unexpected sudden surge in power due to the excess steam building up in one of those reactors. Nobody knew that was about to happen instead of hearing loud noises and burning fires outside their window. Nobody signaled that this could be a disaster at first. Everyone thought it was just a regular fire. The city government called the fire alarm and many firefighters came to the broken nuclear reaction station. Nobody knows that was the amount of the radiation was already well beyond the range of regular tester. The operators inside the room wouldn't know about this. But for those firemen, those high-speed atoms with the radiation were crossing their bodies like bullets. And hundreds of thousands of those bullets were at each second. In the future, billions of trillions of them will be sprayed by the wind to the whole European land in the water we drink and the food we eat. Of 600 workers present on site during the early morning of that day, 133 receive high-dose and severed front radiation sicknesses. 28 die in the first three months and another 19 die in between 1987 to 2004. When I was doing the background research, I looked up the New York Times. An earliest report about a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union was on April 19, 1986. The actual acknowledgement that the accident took place in Chernobyl was on 13th. No reports were released until the third day after Chernobyl explosion. When the world started to pay attention to this calamity, until the Swedish authorities correlated a map of enhanced radiation levels in Europe with the ring direction and announced to the world that a nuclear accident had occurred somewhere in the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet government still didn't give an exact response about the location and left the rest of the world guessing the answer. This means that the Soviet government is actually trying to hide this incident. They want to underplay it as an accident, which is likely to happen everywhere. There is no national alert for chemical contamination. The people in the town were not being asked to evacuate. It takes many years to finally find out what is happening at that cloudless bright night and what problem is hidden behind the giant nuclear station. But why do the people who live nearby seem so unaware of this? Why does the safety problem exist? Nobody knows. Who is to blame? Why does it take so long for us to uncover the truth? Before I answer all these questions, I want to share something really interesting. In a memorable interview, one of the station workers mentioned that back in the last century, it was considered an honor to be able to work near Chernobyl or at a nuclear power station. Because in the era of industrial development, great power and rolling engine were the cornerstones of running a country. It is the most critical existence to feed a giant population. Actually, every country wants to prove that they themselves are the global power holder. Does everything make sense? Of course, the government is trying to do everything it can to promote the benefits of developing industry. Of course, they don't emphasize the honor of nuclear power plants and they don't let people who work in industry know that there are flaws in the design. Of course, when the station exploded, they don't want other adversaries to know that it failed. This also explains why it takes over 20 years for the truth to come to light. What I realized is that government and politics have an extremely powerful impact on the press media. Back to that time, they had the ability to directly influence the media's content. The two of them are connected together. That is to say, what we have seen and heard is actually under control by another higher power. But why does this question still matter right now? Why do I need to keep reminding the importance of holding the notions of knowing the truth? Have you ever thought about a connection with our real life? The pandemic, the election, the global warming. Our eyes always seem to be focused on what others want us to focus on. And other sources of the information we draw our attentions on are really reliable? With this question, I visit one of the journalism professors at the University of Minnesota. So, today I am with Professor Terry from Hubbard School of Journalism at the University of Minnesota. Hi, Professor Terry. Hello. Yeah. So, what I am really interested about this is how big is the influence of the politics nations or governments had on press media such as newspaper, journalism, or any type of forms? Well, it depends on where you are standing, certainly. In the United States, the U.S. government has less impact on press because of the First Amendment and the press freedoms that we have. Places in Europe, it's sort of in the middle. But then there's countries in the East and Middle East where the government basically completely controls the press. According to a paper that I read before, it could have impact on a lot of social incidents such as elections that we have or a lot of disaster that government is trying to not to spread based on trying to protect people from falling into chaos or other kind of purpose. What do you think about that? Is it work or we should not have this? Well, I don't think that the government should tell the press what to do. But there's a relationship, it's a symbiotic relationship between the press and the government. Press' job is to report on the government so that the government can be more effective. How that works in the U.S., of course, is that the press has the freedom to investigate the government, to cover scandal, to cover public events with very limited government interference. In other places, the press serves as sort of what sort of the engine for the government to speak to its public. So in the U.S., the relationship between the press and the government is that there are two separate entities that are antagonists. Where in a place like North Korea, for example, the press is basically the government at the same time. So it doesn't speak or against the government in any way. It helps the government get its messages out. So do you have any thoughts about how like nowadays news or like any media is trustworthy? The best measure for trustworthiness is how a press organization uses the freedoms it has to responsibly report information that citizens need to have access to. In many Western countries, although not all, that relationship looks by how well does the press actually report on the things that the government is doing and how well does it report on things that the government may not want people to know that it's doing. In other countries, the best measure is the level of independence between the press and the government and how much freedom the press gets to operate in those situations. Places with sort of more of a top-down communication system, authoritarian or totalitarian system model, the press might not have any credibility because it might be nothing more than sort of a propaganda arm for the government. Yeah, that makes sense. What you will think about the truth in any kind of like incidents in a society is that the media's responsibility to dig into telling the public and that it is important to know about the truth or to uncover the truth for them. It is in this country and in many Western countries, but the process you're describing is called agenda setting. Agenda setting is a model where the press talks about something and the public responds to what the press is interested in. The original design of agenda setting as a conceptual communication theory is from the 1970s. And in that model, what the researchers determined is things that the press talked about, topics that the press talked about, people in the community that they were looking at had an opinion about those, but topics that the press didn't routinely talk about. Most people in the community didn't have any opinion on it at all. They didn't even know that it existed. And they coined the term, McCombs and Shaw coined the term agenda setting to explain the relationship between the things that the press talks about and the things that the public understands are happening. In countries where the government has a lot of control of the press, they use that agenda setting process to keep the people focused on certain individual things that the government wants them focused on. In our society, the problem is that our media wants to set an agenda to keep eyes on the media and that sometimes that agenda is different than sort of a complete transparent or accurate reporting system in terms of the things that the public might need to know. Do you think this is like inherent good things or like it has pros and cons? Well, anything has pros and cons. The good thing is that we know through lots of sociological testing that if the press talks about something, the public becomes interested in it. The bad part is that there's a commercial incentive in the U.S. system, U.S. press system, that makes the things that the press is going to talk about tend to be things that they think will generate interest in terms of clicks or attention in terms of newscasts or those types of things. So there's a commercial incentive in there that complicates the process. But for the most part, professionals who work in the U.S. media system are very interested in fulfilling sort of this watchdog role on government. We're not the only country that's like that, but we're the country where that happens the most. My last question is, so we're just talking about like the situations, especially for U.S., how can we, especially that a lot of new media start to show up, especially like Internet, there are so many people have rights to share different comments. So how can we identify the quality or like the trustworthiness of the information we perceive from the media? Well, the best way is to ignore people who aren't part of legacy media organizations. So yes, content gets delivered over the Internet, but the people who make the content fall into categories of people who've been making, doing news as far back as the newspaper or radio or television. As compared to random Internet commentator number seven, right? Random Internet commentator number seven might be totally right, but there's a far more likely chance that you're going to be misled by what that person says as opposed to sort of a more legacy organization. It's not 100% true, but it's certainly more true than not. Okay. It's your news from a trusted source. Based on our conversation, we go through the impact of politics to press media and the pros and cons of the news report Liberty. There is no inherently correct that having less open media is better than having highly open media, but it's easy to get lost in so much untested information. Back to the beginning of this broadcast, the importance of finding the truth is protecting ourselves from getting fooled by misinformation, inherently believe it to be truth, and no longer distinguish the truth from lies. Looking back, the moment the station was explored, the neighborhood had already become an extremely dangerous place to stay. What the government was trying to do when it started an emergency meeting was to seal the city, stopping no one reading, cutting phone lines to contain the spread of misinformation, under the saying, keeping people from undermining the fruits of their labor. And we're looking back to history. We focus on more than just the incident itself. Most importantly, what are the lost social lessons we can take from it? How do we construct a tunnel between the past and the present? Because we cannot rewrite history. Instead, we can change the future. That is the lesson we take from Chernobyl. The power of nuclear is undoubtedly intimidating, but what was even more frightening is the ignorance of people. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this broadcast. This is Li, see you next time. Thank you for watching!