Making Sense of Chernobyl Nine Years After: TV News Reception Study of the Environmental Disaster. Soilikki Vettenranta, Associate Professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Education, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway, telephone + 47 73 59 95, e-mail soilikki@svt.ntnu.no
The main objective of this qualitative reception study has been to explain the meaning making process of the authentic Chernobyl television news for fifteen key-informants who were involved in this disaster in Norway, nine years after the accident. The respondents were recruited from three categories: 1) Authorities and experts, 2) Representatives of the media, 3) Laypeople who were especially vulnerable during the disaster. The aim was to discover how the news affected their interpretations of the disaster and what kinds of thoughts, reactions and associations the risk messages provoked in retrospect, in the present and in the respondents' beliefs about the future. The ontological analysis was based on the application of Heidegger’s existentiales and the epistemological analysis of Habermas’ theory of the communicative action.
The findings indicate that the Chernobyl news on TV was mainly based on technical rationality, while the respondents more often constructed the meaning on the basis of symbolic, cultural rationality. a conflict between the transmitted risk messages, which the sender constructed in the physical time dimension, and the messages which were received in the anthropological time dimension was also found. In the previous Chernobyl studies inquiries have focused on the immediate fear response and on instrumental, technical risk perception. This study claims that the fundamental anxiety level and the cultural context of risk experience have been overlooked in these studies.
This doctoral dissertation shows how the transmitting of Chernobyl news led to a huge loss of credibility for the sender, and on the receiver end, the situation caused a great mistrust of the authorities, experts and even the media. The loss of credibility and trust are also the dominat features in retrospect. The respondents could point to the characteristics that led to the communication collapse: ambiguousness, plans to manipulate information, misinformation and attempts to arrest information.
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