How did the media report a missing radioactive capsule in Australia's outback?

Abstract

In 2023, a radioactive capsule went missing in Western Australia's outback. It made international news. Research shows that public concerns about radiation's health effects remain dormant until an issue or 'focusing event' brings them to the public's consciousness. For example, public concern accelerated after the announcement of the planned rollout of the fifth generation (5G) of cellular network technology across Australia in 2019. This opinion article considers news coverage alongside public and media enquiries to Australia's national radiation protection authority to determine whether this incident in 2023 became a focusing event. Using data collected from ProQuest, we found that the search for the whereabouts of this mint-sized radioactive object was the focus of 559 news stories in the week that it was lost and then found. We conducted close readings of these news stories to investigate how the story was framed. We focused our analysis on coverage from a representative sample of Australia's most popular news brands. We found that while stories framed the missing capsule incident as 'dangerous', the national radiation protection authority only received a handful of public enquiries on this topic. This result is not unexpected, given that the incident was isolated both in terms of geography and being a single event. However, it is surprising when considering public responses to radiation news reporting of past incidents. It could be argued that the media's reliance on official sources and framing of the recovery effort to find a 'tiny' object in the Australian outback helped mitigate concerns about this radiation incident.