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This compared how Canadian newspapers reported on workplace injuries and fatalities versus data from the workers’ compensation data.

They sought to answer three questions:

• What types of injuries & fatalities are reported in the newspapers and how do these reports compare with the workers’ compensation data?
• What demographic and occupational info is presented in the newspapers and how do these compare to the workers’ compensation data?
• Where do journalists seek their info about workplace injuries and fatalities?

Data included 245 Canadian newspaper articles from between 09-14 and data from the workers’ compensation scheme.

In providing rationale for this topic, it’s said that while there are, of course, physical injuries and diseases (and non-physical), incidents are also socially constructed. People form reality by the stimuli they pay attention to and how they interpret that stimuli and this is influenced by individual values, beliefs, experiences and more.

Personal experience, called experienced reality, “is a powerful but limited source of knowledge.13 Knowledge gleaned from interacting with other people in our social groups, institutions, and the media (‘‘symbolic reality’’) – knowledge that comprises much of what we know about the world – results in the development of shared reality” (p.259). Consequently, the under-acceptance of certain types of injuries or diseases “feeds into and entrenches a social acceptance that those occurrences are not work related and therefore do not require employer, society, or government action to remediate them” (p259). They provide an example of a long-held scepticism towards certain asbestos-related diseases or repetitive stress injuries in women and how long these took to gain acceptance.

The media is said to also play a role in social construction processes because it also shapes symbolic realities. People develop frames to combine experience and symbolic realities. Frames are clusters of factual and interpretive claims that help people to organise how they understand events. A frame would be that most accidents are due to human carelessless. If we hold such a frame, we find instances of carelessness everywhere.

Frames are supported by narratives. Narratives “narrow preestablished social constructions that are similar to rhetorical idioms (i.e. recurring rhetorical elements and speech that culturally anchor social problems” (p259). An example of a narrative is that young men are risk-takers, and this is used to quickly (and potentially inaccurately) characterise an event.

Narratives and frames combine to provide storylines that assist the media in making events that are understandable to readers; but at the same time, reinforcing assumptions or beliefs.

Results

When newspaper reports of workplace injuries and fatalities were compared to workers compensation and fatality data, newspapers were “were found to dramatically over-report fatalities, injuries to men, and injuries in the construction and mining/quarrying/oil industries” (p260).

Newspapers also overreported injuries that involved contact with objects & equipment and fires/explosions, and transport incidents. Acute physical injuries were also overrepresented (burns, fractures, head injuries and other traumatic injuries).

Other findings included:

Some points they highlighted in the discussion are worth covering. The bias in reporting towards fatalities, men, construction industry, and injuries caused by contact “provides readers with a misleading picture of who is injured and how they are injured in Canadian workplaces” and further “This finding is important because unrepresentative media reports, which play an important role in shaping our symbolic reality, pose a significant threat to the validity of the views of workers, employers, and policymakers about workplace injury” (p262).

One problematic area is the “virtual invisibility” of injuries to women and non-acute injuries, like repetitive stress injury and occupational diseases [the latter of which, luckily, have been getting a lot more attention in the media lately, such as asbestosis, silicosis, mesothelioma, black lung etc.]

Injuries to women are said to be mentioned in only 4.4% of newspaper reports despite comprising 37% of compensation claims. The invisibility of women may be due, in part, to the bias towards fatalities in media, which are predominately men; but not ignoring “the long history of dismissing occupational injuries and diseases reported by female workers” (p263). This focus may perpetuate a social construction that workplace injuries are primarily a male concern.

The focus on fatalities in media also paints a misleading picture of the relative frequency of these severity incidents in industry (and potentially downplays the thousands of traumatic, life-changing injuries or less severe injuries that still impact workers, their families and communities). Nevertheless, newspapers are drawn to the shock value of the events.

Overall, it’s said that these findings highlight that newspaper reports of workplace injuries “present a profoundly misleading picture of workplace injuries and fatalities in Canada” (p264). The reports may normalise particular types of injuries in particular industries, hide the true degree of risk faced by workers and bolster rhetoric that workplaces are getting safer. A skewed perception of injuries may bias public policies and what issues to focus on.

Authors: Bob Barnetson, Jason Foster, 2015, International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health

Study link: https://dx.doi.org/10.1179%2F2049396715Y.0000000003

Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bleeds-leads-construction-workplace-injury-canadian-ben-hutchinson