ABSTRACT
Today's risk perception and communication scholars embrace the challenges associated with seeking to understand audiences as active participants in the risk communication process. Gone, thankfully, are the days when both researchers and practitioners assumed that one need only invest in the careful construction of messages, in order to educate or persuade. During those naïve decades, unsuccessful outcomes—and there were many—were simply blamed on the audience. Today, we realize that one can achieve a reasonable fit between message and outcome only by coming to grips with the judgments that audiences make, about both messages and the channels that disseminate them, and then by aligning our communication efforts accordingly.
