The CARMA Report: Western media coverage of humanitarian disasters (original) (raw)

“Regarding the Pain of Others”: Media, Bias and the Coverage of International Disasters

Disaster Prevention and Management Knowledge (quarterly), 2015

ver the last two years the world has had a surfeit of disasters. Everywhere one turned there were new photographs of bodies lined up so relatives could come and claim them. In October 2005, the images of covered corpses, stunned faces, keening mothers, tumbled homes and nature gone awry resulted from the South Asia earthquake. In August, the global tragedy was Hurricane Katrina, where the bodies the world saw weren't under rubble but floating in New Orleans' toxic flood. In July, the casualties were British; grainy cell phone photos carried viewers into the very moment that terror struck the London transport system. In December 2004, the sprawled bodies in awkward, disconcerting color were the child and adult victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Three months earlier, in September, the translucent corpses of children were from the school siege in Beslan. And virtually every dayshould one have troubled to look for them-one could find photographs of the human and other wreckage of another suicide bombing, or three, in Iraq. But not all of the crises of this past year or so have equally commanded the attention of the world and its cameras. Some disasters have had the bad luck to occur at a moment when a more telegenic disaster was already capturing global attention. The worst tragedy in Iraq in 2005 occurred on 31 August. At the same time that flood waters were sweeping over New Orleans, up to one million Iraqis walking to a Shi'ite shrine in Baghdad stampeded when the rumor that there was a suicide bomber in their midst swept through the crowd. Almost a thousand people died and nearly five hundred more were injured. Then there were the mudslides in Central America. "I have never known an emergency become forgotten as quickly as Guatemala's, where 120,000 people have been made homeless, on the very day it came to the world's attention," recalled Toby Porter, emergencies director of Save the Children UK. But that was the same day that the earthquake shook Pakistan and India. "A country hit by a volcanic eruption, a hurricane and then devastating mudslides would in any normal week be considered

Unreported world: A critical analysis of UK newspaper coverage of post‐disaster events

The Geographical Journal, 2020

This paper assesses the extent to which a disparity exists in post-disaster reporting of global North and global South events in UK newspapers, how that disparity manifests itself, and the consequences of that disparity. A critical discourse analysis was used involving a documentary analysis of UK national newspaper articles published on two disasters, Hurricane Harvey in the USA and the South Asian monsoon, in 2017. A reporting bias was found in favour of the number of articles published, the length of those articles, and duration of coverage for the global North disaster. Language used and imagery evoked also differed considerably. Whereas UK media coverage of the global North focused on shared cultural, economic and political values, coverage of the global South emphasised difference, reinforcing an "us" and "them" mentality based on the poor alignment of national/political interests. Such disparities are deeply problematic for informing the public about global matters of concern, creating empathy between nations, and building support for collective action.

The Sky Is Falling: Predictors of News Coverage of Natural Disasters Worldwide

Communication Research, 2015

General journalistic principles guide the ways that gatekeepers evaluate the newsworthiness of events. These principles are adapted in the field of international communication and indicate some unique features, in particular, of international disasters reporting. The current research examined the presence, amount, and length of news coverage from 3 major U.S. newspapers on 292 global natural disasters from 2004 to 2014. Results showed that U.S. newspapers had a reasonable neglect of international disasters compared with domestic ones and a disproportional favor toward huge versus smaller size disasters. A systematic predicting model was evident: Severity was the most significant and the only consistent determinant of disasters reports, followed by the intensity of deviance. Geographic distance and degree of relevance between countries failed to predict any variance of news coverage. This finding might demonstrate a return to the news value that the newsworthiness of an event should ...

Media disaster coverage over time: Methodological issues and results

In 2000 disaster struck Enschede in The Netherlands. Due to explosions at a fireworks factory, 22 people were killed. This study aims to describe the developments in the media coverage of this disaster. Content analysis was performed on 4928 articles, derived from four distinct newspapers. After a period of intense coverage, media attention for the disaster declined. In this first month 772 articles were run (local paper 457, national papers 315). After three years this number is approximately 30 articles per month. This decline can be best described by an inverse function. This paper focuses on the changes in the amount of news coverage, and concentrates on some methodological issues researchers encounter when they try to analyse the news coverage of a disaster over time. issues arise and win the battle for the media's and public's attention. In the coverage of a disaster one may expect differ- ences between local and national newspapers. News- papers have to write storie...

Risk and the Politics of Disaster Coverage in Haiti and Katrina

Communication, Culture & Critique, 2014

Despite the much greater loss of life and physical damage, the earthquake was covered as a manageable crisis while Katrina became catastrophic. This difference in the articulation of disaster had less to do with the actual type of event or damage and more to do with previous expectations regarding security, based in the conceptual apparatus of risk. The idea of risk provided a normative set of expectations about the ability to mitigate disaster. The comparison highlights the political work of disaster news in affirming racialized distinctions between ''developed'' and ''underdeveloped'' nations and the role that the idea of risk has in this mapping.