The Communications Failures Lessons of Three Mile Island

Dr. Peter M. Sandman

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Don’t Lie; Don’t Even Tell Half-Truths

In general, companies and government agencies try hard not to lie outright, but they usually feel entitled to say things that may be technically accurate, but misleading—especially in a crisis when they are trying to keep people calm. Ethics aside, the strategy usually backfires. People learn the other half of the truth, or just sense that they aren’t being leveled with, and their anxiety is exacerbated. Panic is rare in crisis situations; people often feel panicky but usually manage to act rationally and even altruistically. But panic is paradoxically likelier when the authorities are being less than candid in their effort to avert panic.

For example, the nuclear power plant in central Pennsylvania was in deep trouble. The emergency core cooling system had been mistakenly turned off; a hydrogen bubble in the containment structure was considered capable of exploding, which might breach the core vessel and cause a meltdown. In the midst of the crisis, when any number of things were going wrong, MetEd put out a news release claiming that the plant was “cooling according to design.”

Months later I asked the PR director how he could justify such a statement. Nuclear plants are designed to survive a serious accident, he explained. They are designed to protect the public even though many things are going wrong. So even though many things were going wrong at TMI, the plant was, nonetheless, “cooling according to design.” Needless to say, his argument that he hadn’t actually lied did not keep his misleading statement from irreparably damaging the company’s credibility.

Expect the Media to Over-Reassure

In ordinary times, journalists tend to make the news as dramatic as possible; their sensationalist bias is built in. But not in a crisis—that’s when journalists ally with their sources in a misguided effort to keep people calm by being overly reassuring.

The Kemeny Commission (the U.S. government commission set up to investigate TMI) conducted a content analysis of network, wire service, and major newspaper coverage during the first week of the 1979 TMI accident. The commission’s expectations of sensationalism were not confirmed. Of media passages that were clearly either alarming or reassuring in thrust, 60% were reassuring. If you stick to the technical issues, eliminating passages about inadequate flow of information and general expressions of fear from local citizens, the preponderance of reassuring over alarming “technical” statements was 73% to 27%. It didn’t seem that way at the time, of course, for several reasons.

Frightened people pick up on negative information more than on positive information. Vincent Covello, director of the Center for Risk Communication in New York, argues that in a crisis it takes three pieces of good news to balance one piece of bad news.
The news that something previously assumed safe may or may not be hazardous naturally strikes people as alarming, almost regardless of the amount of attention paid to the two sides. (Imagine reading this evening that scientists disagree over whether your favorite food is carcinogenic.) Sociologist Allan Mazur found that public fearfulness about risky new technologies is proportional to the amount of coverage, not to its character. TMI was a big, big story; even if the content was reassuring, the amount of content was alarming.
Most importantly, overly reassuring content is alarming. The public, especially the local public, could tell that the authorities were deeply worried and thoroughly bewildered. In that context, seeing MetEd on TV insisting that the plant was cooling according to design and that everything was under control certainly made things worse.

Reporters at TMI weren’t averse to accusing their sources of withholding information. But they were reluctant to report—reluctant even to notice—how often their sources didn’t know what was going on themselves and how frightened their sources were about what might happen next.

Keep It Simple

The need for simple explanations of complex phenomena isn’t just an axiom of crisis communication; it’s fundamental to any sort of communication. But two things change in a crisis. First, audiences are less tolerant of complexity when they’re upset. Apathetic people just stop listening when they can’t understand what’s being said; interested people ask for clarification. But frightened or angry people decide you’re trying to con them, and therefore become more frightened and more angry.

The second reason why keeping it simple is fundamental in crisis situations is this: Sources tend to speak more complexly when they’re upset. Some of this is unconscious; your anxiety makes you hide behind big words and fancy sentences. Some of it is intentional. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) officials at TMI were worried (mistakenly, as it turned out) that a hydrogen bubble in the containment structure might explode and cause a meltdown. When they shared this possibility with journalists, they did it in such polysyllabic prose that reporters thought they were denying it, not acknowledging it.

The level of technical jargon was actually higher at TMI when the experts were talking to the public and the news media than when they were talking to each other. The transcripts of urgent telephone conversations between nuclear engineers were usually simpler to understand than the transcripts of news conferences. They said things to each other like, “It looks like we’ve got a load of core damage,” then made the same point to the media in phrases so technical that not one reporter got the message.

To be sure, jargon is a genuine tool of professional communication, conveying meaning (to those with the requisite training) precisely and concisely. But it also serves as a sort of membership badge, a sign of the status difference between the professional and everyone else. And especially in a crisis, it’s a way to avoid looking scared and avoid communicating scary information.

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