News commentary

4 details you should include in news stories about risks to public health and safety

The Journalist's Resource · Denise-Marie Ordway · last updated November 10, 2025 – 10:52 AM

Imagine how you’d react if you were at the beach planning to play in the waves with your best friend’s kids when you hear this news on the radio: Shark attacks have tripled over the last three years on a stretch of shoreline that includes the beach you’re standing on.

Some people might respond by staying out of the ocean. Some might leave and avoid the beach completely.

But what if the radio journalist added that three shark attacks were reported to authorities last year, up from one attack three years earlier? Or that sharks had attacked only young adults riding surf or boogie boards more than 50 feet from shore?

What if the news story also mentioned that the number of visitors to this shoreline has more than tripled in recent years thanks to beach improvements and the opening of new resorts, restaurants and tourist attractions?

These details make a big difference in how the public interprets and responds to news about threats to personal health and safety. The problem is that journalists sometimes leave out critical context when reporting on topics such as:

Drugs and their side effects.
Air travel safety.
The odds of becoming a crime victim.
Extreme weather.
Birth defects.
Ultra-processed foods.
Environmental contaminants.

Former journalist David Ropeik says he did not realize his own reporting had been incomplete until he left his job at WCVB-TV in Boston to work in the public affairs office of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, where researchers study risks to public health and the environment.

“When I learned more about risk, I was embarrassed by my journalism,” says Ropeik, who specialized in science and environmental reporting during his two decades at WCVB-TV.

When stories lack certain details, individuals have difficulty gauging their own level of risk so they can figure out how to avoid or mitigate it, Ropeik says. When key information is missing, audiences might make incorrect assumptions or rely on myths. Insufficient reporting can also unnecessarily cause fear, stress and confusion.

“Incomplete risk reporting causes harm because it doesn’t give people the information they need to make the healthiest choice for them and their circumstances — what to eat, what they should wear, where to go, how to travel,” Ropeik adds.

In the years since he left his TV newsroom, he has led trainings, written three books and opened a consulting firm to help people better communicate about personal risk. We asked Ropeik and other experts to help us create a tip sheet to guide journalists in covering risks to people’s health and safety.

Along with Ropeik, we interviewed Maricarmen Climént, a science journalist and specialist in health risk communication at the nonprofit Sense About Science, and Toni van der Meer, an associate professor of communication science at the University of Amsterdam.

Here are four recommendations they made:

1. Explain who is at risk and who is most at risk.

Many news stories do not explain that risks often affect different groups of people differently.

For example, the risk of motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. is highest among teenagers, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. But some between the ages of 16 and 19 face an elevated risk: male teens, teens who recently received their licenses, teens who drive a lot on nights and weekends, and those who drive with passengers who are teenagers or young adults.

While air pollution is generally bad for everyone, children, older adults, pregnant women and individuals with heart and lung disease are especially vulnerable, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Ropeik points out that lead, a toxic metal sometimes found in drinking water, playground dirt and food, impacts people differently.

“Lead is bad for little kids because their brains are still developing and less bad for a grown-up,” he says. “Risk is not black and white. Is the person on chemotherapy? Does the person have comorbidities — overweight, a smoker, old age — or are they male or female? There is a difference in how some bodies respond to some things.”

van der Meer says journalists should also explain why some groups are more at risk than others. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he says, people relied heavily on news outlets for information about how the virus spread and who was most vulnerable. But not all news coverage explained why older adults, racial and ethnic minorities, and people with certain health conditions were more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19.

“Many stories reported that ‘young, healthy people are at low risk’ without explaining why risk was higher for others — for instance, how chronic conditions, systemic inequities, or exposure in essential jobs contributed to severity,” van der Meer wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource after being interviewed on Zoom. “Without that context, audiences could assume risk was purely a matter of age or luck.”

2. Use numerical estimates to convey how rare or common the risk is.

It’s important to point out the prevalence of a risk. In news stories about plane crashes, for instance, van der Meer recommends noting how often they occur and that traveling by air is, statistically, much safer than traveling on roads and highways.

In the U.S., almost 95% of people killed while traveling die as the result of automobile accidents, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported earlier this year.

Leaving such information out of stories about plane crashes contributes to the misperception that they occur more frequently than they actually do, says van der Meer, lead author of the 2022 paper, “Do News Media Kill? How a Biased News Reality Can Overshadow Real Societal Risks, The Case of Aviation and Road Traffic Accidents.”

He and his colleagues found that news outlets’ disproportionate coverage of plane crashes prompts some people to drive long distances to avoid commercial air travel. After analyzing 24,954 articles about aviation accidents published in five “popular” U.S. newspapers from January 1996 to December 2017 and examining data on U.S. automobile crashes during that period, the researchers concluded that airplane crash coverage is linked to increased road traffic, a larger number of automobile crashes and more people dying in automobile crashes.

Climént urges journalists to use numbers to demonstrate the frequency of a risk. Using words like “rare,” “likely” or “often” are too ambiguous on their own, says Climént, who helps communities in several countries evaluate claims and data about risk as part of her work with the Risk Know-How project at Sense About Science. She is also host of the Spanish-language health news podcast, “Pan Pa’l Susto.”

“We should add numbers to explain what those words mean,” she says. “What is ‘rare’? Is it 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1 million?”

Because estimates for risk tend to be imprecise, stories with estimates presented as a range of numbers instead of a single number will generally be more accurate. A hypothetical example: For every 100 women who took a new medication, between 40 and 48 saw their symptoms reduced within two months.

3. For risks involving substances such as heavy metals, mold, foods, drugs and gases, note the amount that is considered hazardous and the amount generally considered safe.

To help audiences understand the riskiness of a particular substance, it’s necessary to explain how much a human would need to be exposed to over a specific period of time to suffer harm.

For some substances, occasional exposure may have little effect. But chronic exposure — for example, inhaling microscopic asbestos fibers over many years — can cause serious illness or lead to disability or even death.

“Stories often say something like ‘Substance X causes Y,’ but they fail to say how much of substance X it takes,” Ropeik writes in “Risk Reporting 101: What Journalists Should Know About Hazards and Exposure,” an explainer published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2011.

He says it’s also important to note the quantity that poses little or no harm. This, he adds, helps dispel myths and misinformation about the dangers of substances such as radiation.

If experts are unsure how much of a substance poses a risk, he adds, make that clear in the story.

3. Include data on both relative and absolute risk.

Many news stories point out relative risk, which indicates how much larger or smaller one number is compared with another. However, research indicates many news stories leave out information on absolute risk, or the probability that something will happen.

On its own, relative risk can be misleading, Climént says.

“To understand the true magnitude [of a risk], people need the absolute risk,” she says.

A hypothetical example: Let’s say a journalist writes a story revealing that reports of sexual assault rose nearly 70% among students at a local university from 2023 to 2024. That percentage will capture many readers’ attention. But the risk to students might seem exaggerated — or understated — if the journalist does not mention the number of reports filed during each of those two years.

If the number of reports rose from, say, three in 2023 to five in 2024, it stands to reason that students’ risk of sexual assault would be lower than if the number of reports rose from, say, 60 reports to 100. Both represent a 66.7% increase in reports.

Climént says that when news outlets report on the impact of eating certain foods, taking certain medications or developing certain habits, they need to explain how the experiences of people who do those things compare with the experiences of people who do not.

A hypothetical example: It could be misleading to report that for every 100 people who eat a certain food each week, an estimated 33 people will eventually develop heart disease, without also reporting that for every 100 people who do not eat that food, an estimated 12 people will develop it. This means that among 100 people who eat the food, about 12 cases of heart disease would have occurred anyway and about 21 could be associated with the food.”

“If we’re talking about food, for example — maybe ultra-processed food or red meat — and a consequence that we are studying, we need to know the chances of developing the effect in both groups,” she adds.

Other resources

Risk Journalism: A Guide to Clear Reporting on Any Topic, a tip sheet that Climént created.

Risk Know-How, an online platform created by Sense About Science to help communities make sense of risk.

Duke Center on Risk, a research center at Duke University in North Carolina.

Harding Center for Risk Literacy, a research center at the University of Potsdam in Germany.

Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, a research center at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

We would like to thank Tyler Felgenhauer, research director at the Duke Center on Risk and a senior research scientist with the Modeling Environmental Risks and Decisions Group at Duke University, for his help reviewing and providing feedback on this tip sheet.

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