Media Freak-outs: Every Week Is Shark Week

On The Colony, every week is Shark Week. And what with upcoming apocalypse movies like The Road and 2012 and the end-of-days rumblings of talk TV and radio, the same is now true for the rest of us. Superterrorists, natural disasters and megaviruses are not imaginary. But they're more viscerally scary and easier to apprehend than vital but boring systemic problems like the economy and public health.

So we fear and fetishize them over more likely but duller threats; that's a common flaw of risk assessment. Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace--the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark--jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever.

It's what Shark Week's makers and their show-biz peers have always known: the sexier threat is the improbable but unknown one. You are more likely to die by drowning or from melanoma induced by the beach sun. But that one-in-a-million chance of being done in by a primeval predator from the murky depths--that's the threat with teeth.

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