Watching 1 to 3 hours of TV coverage per day in the week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks predicted a 20% increase in reports of physician-diagnosed physical ailments such as asthma and hypertension 2 to 3 years later, says a team led by Roxane Cohen Silver of the University of California, Irvine. This and other findings from their survey data on more than 1,700 people strongly suggest that widespread media coverage of terrorism can have negative mental- and physical-health consequences over time, even for people not directly exposed to attacks.
SOURCE: Mental- and Physical-Health Effects of Acute Exposure to Media Images of the September 11, 2001, Attacks and the Iraq War
