Editorial

Perception isn't reality

Perception may sometimes resemble or even match reality, but not very often. Things usually aren’t as bad as they appear. They often don’t even appear that bad if you pay close attention. Unfortunately, sometimes they are worse.
In Walkerton Ontario there may have been a perception that something was amiss with the drinking water. But nobody expected people to start dying.
Thanks to Walkerton and other occasional disasters, when something happens to the water supply, it seems terribly ominous. The recent boil water advisory in Slave Lake is a good example. What was wrong? Was the equipment failing? Was the system mismanaged? Was the water really that bad?
As it turns out, none of the above. The real culprit is that government standards for acceptable levels of turbidity in the water recently became five times stricter. So what would have passed a year ago no longer passes. A good thing, no doubt, but it can also create the perception that things are getting worse when they may not be.
The same probably goes for all kinds of ills. War, crime, disease may appear to be getting worse all the time, but are they really?
The perception of the prevalence of crime is particularly tricky. Most people will tell you that when they were kids, things weren’t nearly as bad as they are now. What that common impression seldom takes into account is that when you’re a kid, your world is a much smaller one. It is defined by narrower interests that don’t include reading newspapers or watching the news on television.
Another factor is that for those who do pay attention to the news, there is a lot more of it these days and most of it is bad. Most of the news was always bad, because bad news is always more interesting than good news. But nowadays there’s a lot more reporting going on, so it seems as if there is more bad stuff happening. It ain’t necessarily so, as Ira Gershwin said.
Another type of reporting adds to the impression that times are getting worse. That is the reporting of crimes such as domestic assault. It may or may not be on the increase, but the reporting of it certainly is. The culture is changing and what was considered none of anybody’s business is now reportable behaviour. It creates the impression that more is going on. Domestic assaults may be up, they may be down or they may be the same as they were 30 years ago. What definitely happens more is reports to the police, so their crime statistics are up. That shouldn’t be confused with an increase in real numbers, but it often is. It’s another false perception that gets confused with reality.
It’s easy to blame the news media for fueling the misperceptions. Governments like to do that, and so does Joe Blow on the street when he’s not blaming government. There’s something to such accusations, but it comes down to the individual to sift through the reports and draw reasonable conclusions. The recent Toronto SARS scare is a case in point.
People blamed the national news media for ‘blowing up’ what is essentially a flu outbreak into something bigger than it really was. But the press shouldn’t be faulted for running stories with big headlines when people were actually dying from a mysterious lung ailment.
What’s the alternative? Small headlines? Page two instead of Page 1? How about CBC reporting it but CTV and Global leaving it alone, so as to avoid saturation?
News will get out. It gets around anyway, through channels that range from fairly reliable to highly unreliable. It’s up to every individual to judge the reliability of the source, apply common sense, keep an open mind, keep informed from a variety of sources and act accordingly.
Sometimes that happens, but often it doesn’t.