We are certainly at risk of things falling from the sky. The dinosaurs, and most species that lived on Earth around 65 million years ago, found this out the hard way. So did the residents of Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. Other incidents are peppered throughout history, including the legendary Tunguska Incident of 1908.

Thanks to modern astronomy, we know that asteroids seem to fly near to the Earth on a fairly regular basis, with a recent approach coinciding with Halloween. It's good to see reports on these subjects, but it also seems that the media is starting to panic too much, or at least fail to read the fine print in media releases.

Almost every flyby is now reported as a "close approach", even if it's well beyond the orbit of the Moon. There's no standard definition of what constitutes being close to Earth, but I feel that anything more than 200,000 kilometres away shouldn't fit this definition. That's well within the orbit of the Moon, but still far away enough to give us space to avoid it.

For the record, the "Halloween" asteroid came no closer than more than twice my minimum threshold for a true "close approach" to Earth. But don't expect the media to tell you. Some sources did, but for many reports, the real truth was buried by sensationalism.

The European Space Agency (and SpaceDaily) published a clear report stating that the asteroid was no threat to Earth. These were not the only sources of truth in the global mediasphere. The truth was certainly out there, but there was also an excessive amount of distortion.

All things considered, there seems to have been more hype and scare than straight facts. That would certainly affect the way the public as a whole perceived the incident. Most people don't read aerospace and technical media, but they should be able to get the real story though conventional media sources.

We could consider parallels with another media incident. On Halloween of 1938, Orson Welles aroused widespread controversy for his "mockumentary" radio play based on the H. G. Wells science fiction novel War of the Worlds, which convinced many listeners that Earth was being attacked by Martians. Orson Welles hosted a regular fictional radio show, which should have filtered out the less gullible listeners as panic subjects.

But the 2015 Halloween asteroid story was based on facts and presented as factual news, even if some of the claims were stretched. The media are lucky that the public hasn't shown more displeasure with their bad reportage.

The media is primed for stories about gloom and doom. They seem consistent with a world around us that's becoming highly dysfunctional, chaotic and dangerous. A recent sequence of lunar eclipses seems to have convinced some people that the end of the world was nigh. Just a few years ago, many people were convinced that the world would end in December 2012. Doomsday fears seem wired into the psyches of the pubic as well as the media. Publicity for these scenarios included references to meteors hitting the Earth in some narratives.

It's true that threats from meteor impacts are real, and the whole subject of protecting Earth from these impacts deserves serious treatment. But going overboard with the reportage threatens to discredit a genuinely serious subject, especially when we are living in such a climate of fear.

Let's continue to marvel at the smaller members of the solar system, but let's not exaggerate the proximity or the threat of these objects. Let's stop calling them all "close approaches", as if they could be at risk of hitting us. Like it or not, that's how the public are being trained to perceive such reports and claims.

Hyperbole in reporting gets people worried for unnecessary reasons. That's an over-reaction. Ironically, it could also provoke an under-reaction. People could soon treat real "close approaches" that could be dangerous as media hype, simply because they have witnessed too many exaggerated incidents in the past. So will governments and emergency authorities.

The media needs to take a more balanced approach, and so do the "spin doctors" at various scientific and space research agencies that feed these stories. It's true that we need more support for space research from governments and the public.

That support is best generated through the publication of truth and accuracy. Eventually, over-hype and excessive spin could backfire, reducing the rather lukewarm support that currently exists to even lower levels. Such tactics could also discredit the very legitimate work being done around the world to protect us from these hazards.

So, we have not been physically hit by any meteors this Halloween, but the media delivered plenty of hits to millions of people. We need protection from hazardous impacts, but we also need protection from bad spin and bad reportage.

Dr Morris Jones is an Australian space analyst who has written for spacedaily.com since 1999. Email morrisjonesNOSPAMhotmail.com. Replace NOSPAM with @ to send email. Dr Jones will answer media inquiries.