Not All Disasters Are Created Equal: Evaluating Differences in Fire and Hurricane Media Coverage

Abstract:

News media is the primary way people gather information about natural disasters, including relevant safety, evacuation, and aid. The news media also plays a significant role in community recovery efforts post-disaster. With increasing frequencies of natural disasters, understanding media coverage is critical for identifying opportunities to improve our disaster responses. This empirical study evaluates a corpus of 1 million newspaper articles from local sources to evaluate media coverage of two water-related disasters: wildfires and hurricanes. Our findings indicate that fires and hurricanes are not treated equally by the media, either in coverage frequency or quality. These coverage inequalities have important wide-ranging implications for safety responses of our local communities, including behaviors of those affected, law-makers’ policy decisions, and emergency management preventative measures.