ABSTRACT
As soon as the Chernobyl accident on 26 April 1986 was reported in newspapers and on TV, the actual events (initial deaths at the power plant turned out to be 31: firefighters and plant workers) rapidly became magnified in several countries and guesses by reporters were wildly inaccurate. Thus in the United Kingdom the Daily Mirror on 30 April headlined ‘Please get me out Mummy’, ‘Terror of Trapped Britons’ and ‘2,000 are feared dead in Nuclear Horror’. The Detroit Medical News of 12 May stated ‘So the Russians have started to self-destruct. That is the good news, the bad news is that they are exporting the fallout across the globe.’. The New York Post was most outlandish with ‘15,000 Dead in Mass Grave’. TV was not always much better with an American TV network buying for 20 000 US dollars a video purporting to be Chernobyl burning. Unfortunately for them, the views were recognised by Italians as being those of a fire at a Trieste cement factory. An ABC TV newscaster was reported to have said ‘It is one mistake we will try not to make again.’.
