I'm embarrassed by my profession.

We consumer reporters should warn you about life's important risks, but instead, we mislead you about dubious risks.

I first started thinking about this when interviewing Ralph Nader years ago, before he stopped speaking to me. Nader worried about almost everything: Food? "It can spoil in your own refrigerator," Chicken? "[It's] contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides." Flying? "Inadequate maintenance." Carpets? "Rugs are dirt collectors. And dirt collectors mean internal, indoor air pollution." Coffee? "Caffeine is not very good for you."

He went on and on. Just interviewing him was exhausting. Nader and interest groups like his fuel the Fear Industrial Complex: the network of activists, government bureaucrats, and trial lawyers who profit by scaring people.

The media should be skeptical of their prophesies of doom, but we rarely are.

My TV program, "20/20," has done frightening reports on the dangers of paper shredders, soccer goals, lawn chemicals, cell phones, garage-door openers, and more. There's always some truth behind the scares -- someone got hurt, or some study somewhere found a risk. But we rarely put the danger in perspective. We give you a breathless rush of alarm over every possibility, often delivered with a throbbing rock beat.

Sometimes we don't even get the numbers right. Remember the summer of the shark? It was nonsense. That summer the number of shark attacks was hardly different from two previous years. But in those other years we had an election to cover, or OJ was on trial. Mid-summer 2001 didn't bring many sexy stories, so Time did a cover story on "the Summer of the Shark."

It should have embarrassed the media into putting risks in perspective. But it didn't.

Listening to us, you'd think our growing exposure to pesticides, food additives, and other mysterious chemicals has created America's "cancer epidemic." But in truth there is no cancer epidemic -- cancer incidence is flat, and death rates have been falling for years. But such good news doesn't get much play. No interest groups benefit from it. Continued...