(Screencap source)

Dear media,

The general public/yours truly didn't have a clue about what radation levels constituted "dangerous" or "normal" before the Japan Quake, and since most people aren't as hyperactive news-readers as I, most don't know today that minute amounts of radiation are everywhere, and no cause for concern.

But when you report that there are "trace" or "minute" amounts of radiation in milk or in the air, people don't know that radiation also comes from flying cross country, or even from eating a banana. And because you don't tell them that, (instead saying that "government experts say it wont hurt us"), what you're really telling people to do is to freak out unnecessarily, and from what we know about stress, I'm fairly positive that the media attention to this is going to cause more economic damage in worry and reduced buying of COMPLETELY SAFE PRODUCTS than the radiation ever could.

The fix is simple: compare the radiation level in milk to a "normal" level, or use some sort of relative figure, for example that a person would have to drink 6 billion glasses of milk to get a dangerous dose. These are easy. Sadly, your duty to alert/alarm works, in this case, against the public interest, and it's one of the few times I'm quite disappointed in the modern media.