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Article Research Geosci Research article Geosci. Commun., 2, 125–141, 2019 https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2-125-2019 © Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Seismic risk: the biases of earthquake media coverage Maud H. Devès1,2, Marion Le Texier3, Hugues Pécout4, and Claude Grasland4,5 1Université de Paris, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, CNRS UMR 7154, 75005 Paris, France 2Université de Paris, Institut Humanités Sciences Sociétés, Centre de Recherche Psychanalyse Médecine et Société, CNRS EA 3522, 75013 Paris, France 3Université de Rouen Normandie, UMR CNRS 6266 IDEES, 76781 Mont-Saint-Aignan CEDEX, France 4Université de Paris, Collège international des sciences territoriales, CNRS FR 2007, 75013 Paris, France 5Université de Paris, Géographie-Cités, UMR 8504, 75006 Paris, France Correspondence: Maud H. Devès ([email protected]) Received: 27 March 2019 – Discussion started: 17 April 2019 Accepted: 6 July 2019 – Published: 15 August 2019 Abstract. The capacity of individuals to cope with threat- vented. If scientific messages are to be communicated, they ening situations depends directly on their capacity to antici- should be broadcast a few hours after an event. Why not take pate what will come next. The media should play a key role the opportunity to familiarize people with the real timeline of in that respect, but an extensive analysis of earthquake me- seismic disasters? dia coverage by the international news reveals systematic bi- ases. Exploring a corpus of 320 888 news articles published by 32 worldwide newspapers in 2015 in English, Spanish or 1 Introduction French, we found that the press covers a very small num- ber of events: 71 % of the news about seismic events was 1.1 Newspapers play a key role in times of disaster dedicated to only 3 earthquakes (among the 1559 magni- tude 5C events). A combination of frequency and content Despite the increasing influence of social media, newspapers analysis reveals a typical framing of the “earthquake news”. remain major gatekeepers in the process of selection and dis- Except for the “Nepal quake”, the duration of the cover- semination of the news proposed by press agencies to na- age is usually very short. Thus, the news tends to focus on tional and local audiences (Harcup and O’Neill, 2017). For short-term issues: the event magnitude, tsunami alerts, hu- risk managers, they remain an important tool for reaching man losses, material damage and rescue operations. Longer- a wide range of people (Cottle, 2014). Hence, one can ex- term issues linked to the recovery, restoration, reconstruc- pect the press not only to inform, but also to provide the tion, mitigation and prevention are barely addressed. Preven- public with the knowledge required to reduce disaster risks tive safety measures are almost never mentioned. The news (see, for instance, the media kit created by the Asian Dis- on impacts shows a peculiar appetency for death counts, ma- aster Preparedness Center and the Department of Disaster terial damage estimates and sensationalism. News on the re- Management and Climate Change of the Ministry of Natu- sponse tends to emphasize the role played by the interna- ral Resources and Environment of Lao PDR, Thanthathep et tional community in helping the “poor and vulnerable”. The al., 2016). scientific content of the coverage is often restricted to men- Numerous studies have explored the ability of the news tions of the magnitude, with the concept of the seismic inten- media to influence public perception. According to McClure sity being largely ignored. The notion of the “seismic crisis” et al. (2001) and McClure and Velluppillai (2013), public ed- also seems unclear, with aftershocks sometimes being treated ucation programs and news reports often describe disasters as isolated events. Secondary hazards are barely mentioned, “in ways that accentuate the extent and severity of damage”, except in the case of tsunami alerts. Together, these biases thus contributing to “fatalistic attributions and judgments that contribute to fatalistic judgments that damage cannot be pre- the damage cannot be prevented”. Improper attribution can hinder peoples’ preparedness: “When people attribute dam- Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. 126 M. H. Devès et al.: Seismic risk: the biases of earthquake media coverage age to an earthquake’s magnitude, they invoke an uncontrol- 2000). The development of new forms of electronic commu- lable cause, but when they attribute damage to human design, nication has not modified the previously observed rules, and they invoke a relatively controllable cause”. For authors such recent works have confirmed that the circulation of interna- as Gaddy and Tanjong (1987) or Hiori et al. (1985), under- tional news is still very influenced by cultural factors such standing how the media reports on disaster situations has di- as language and physical factors such as the distance be- rect implications as it shows “how [the] agencies [involved tween the location of the media and the location of events in disaster risk reduction] could reduce fatalism and facili- (Segev, 2016; Grasland et al., 2016). However, the salience tate preventive action by the way they present information of countries is generally manifested over a mixture of hetero- about earthquakes and other disasters”. geneous events, and some authors have focused on subsets It is not uncommon to hear scientists criticizing the press of events that are either mentioned or ignored by the me- for conveying distorted messages (e.g., Smith, 1996; Cocco dia. The event-oriented approach is based on a selection of et al., 2015; Harris, 2015a, b). Journalists have even been foreign news related to a specific topic for which it is pos- accused of playing the role of “crisis catalyst” (Boin et al., sible to define a finite and possibly objective list of events 2008). Comparing the news treatment of a real earthquake occurring in the “real” world. One of the most interesting ar- with that of a false quake prediction, Smith (1996) con- eas of research from this perspective is the study of the me- cluded that “the interest in drama at the expense of pub- dia coverage of earthquakes, for which objective measures lic affairs interferes with good scientific reporting”. In gen- of the magnitude or victims are regularly published. Thus, it eral, scientists denounce the tendency of the press to search is possible to analyze the level of newsworthiness according for “culprits” and “accountability” and for “stirring up old to the general laws postulated by Galtung and its followers rivalry and exaggerating conflicts” (Harris, 2015a, b). Har- (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Harcup and O’Neill, 2001, 2017; ris (2015a) showed how the placement of the information in Wu, 2000) and their specific application to earthquake me- the frame of the pages, the selection of stories, the use of dia coverage (Koopmans and Vliegenthart, 2010). Examin- sources, the selection of data, exaggeration, omissions and ing the news media coverage of more than 900 earthquakes, preferences for certain sources or pieces of information con- Le Texier et al. (2016) showed that the event severity (re- tribute to the oversimplification of scientifically complex ar- ported in the press as a moment magnitude, Mw affected the guments and an orientation toward information interpreta- volume of media coverage following a power law. Studying tions forcing inclination or prejudice for, or against, an argu- the dynamics of public interest in major earthquakes using ment, person or group, putting a particular emphasis on some Google Trends, Tan and Maharjan (2018) found that the du- aspects of the situation. Harris (2015b) concluded that what ration and search peak vary with the death toll and damage he calls the “media filter” can influence the public under- but not with the earthquake magnitude. Earle et al. (2010) standing of scientific uncertainties and argued that a careful found the same pattern for the 2009 Mw 4.3 Morgan Hill study of the media coverage would help scientists to commu- (California) earthquake using Twitter data, from a period of nicate in a manner that reduces the chance of misunderstand- only a dozen minutes. ing. This paper goes further in questioning the existence of systematic trends in how earthquakes are covered by inter- 1.2 Earthquake media coverage and international news national news. More specifically, we look into the temporal flow theory dynamics of the coverage (duration, trends) and into the po- tential existence of a typical framing of “earthquake news” This study, led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers (i.e., by comparing news content between events and be- from geophysics, psychology and geography backgrounds, tween newspapers from various countries and languages). builds on previous results (Devès, 2015; Grasland et al., Section 2 presents the datasets we use and the main steps 2016; Le Texier et al., 2016) to address the following ques- we follow for data analysis. First, we analyze the intensity, tion: in a globalized world, can we find systematic trends in time distribution and content of a large corpus of approx- how the international news published by daily newspapers imately 320 888 news items published by 32 international covers earthquake events? news media RSS feeds in 2015. Second, we associate a sta- By “international news”, we mean news published by daily tistical analysis of the news frequency with a textual analysis newspapers about foreign countries or, in practical terms, of the content of the news. Section 3 describes the main re- news published by newspapers through specific RSS flows sults, and these results are then discussed in Sect. 4. Section entitled “international” or “world”. Many hypotheses about 5 concludes the paper. the rules governing the international news flow were formu- lated more than 50 years ago (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Öst- gaard, 1965) and verified by empirical studies concerning the unequal salience of countries in the media and the effects of size, proximity and the preference for elite countries or negative news (Peterson, 1981; Kim and Barnett, 1996; Wu, Geosci.
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