The Media and Disasters

-by Jurgita Balaisyte, Maria Besiou and Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 6 June 2011-

Introduction

2010 witnessed 385 natural disasters that killed more than 297,000 people worldwide and affected over 217 million others. Some disasters received more media attention than others. Although more than five times more people were affected by China’s floods than by the earthquake in Haiti and the floods in Pakistan combined, China’s floods received far less media attention than either Pakistan or Haiti. In this commentary we discuss the media’s impact on the donations for the affected populations.

Mediatisation
Mediatisation is the process by which political activity and awareness raising has become more focused on media presentation. In this article we use this term to refer to major natural disasters that receive more media attention than others.
The Brookings Institution’s review on the natural disasters of 2010 supports that China’s floods received less media attention than the Pakistan’s floods. The web-portal Reliefweb, administered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), posted only 243 entries on the Chinese floods in comparison with 2500 entries on the flooding in Pakistan.
Another disaster that was well mediatised was the Tohoku disaster in Japan. Despite the scale of the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster, it caused only 1/10 of Haiti’s casualties. This disaster also received broader media coverage, followed by higher fundraising, than China’s floods.
The examples above imply that media attention does not necessarily depend on the number of casualties and the size of the disaster. This raises the question which disasters are well covered by media and why. Read the rest of this article...