Not All Disasters Are Created Equal: An Evaluation of Water Issues in Fire and Hurricane Media Coverage in the United States

Abstract

Water resources are greatly impacted by natural disasters, but very little is known about how these issues are portrayed in the media across different types of disasters. Using a corpus of over 600 thousand local newspaper articles, this research evaluates whether the amount of coverage of water-related concerns of fires and hurricanes reflects news values associated with magnitude and proximity. A more detailed analysis focused on wildfires, which occur on undeveloped land and have the potential to spread rapidly, was also conducted to further evaluate spatial patterns in disaster-related water coverage. Our results indicate that the newspaper coverage patterns for water issues are not equally connected to magnitude and proximity values for fires and hurricanes. In our sample, coverage of water issues in relation to fires and wildfires consistently had an inverse relationship with overall event magnitudes, whereas the coverage of water issues in relation to hurricanes demonstrated a positive correlation. Although wildfires are more likely to be clustered in the western part of the country, there was a lack of positive correlations with wildfire magnitudes in this region. Possible influences for these patterns (e.g., limited impacts to humans and lack of shock-value) are discussed. Given the media’s role in facilitating disaster management and recovery, these nuances in coverage variations provide insight into opportunities for informing water security, which is especially important given the increasing frequency of natural disasters.

Water narratives in local newspapers within the United States

“…The general sentiments expressed in these articles also skewed more toward negative terms than positive ones, likely reflecting concerns of water availability and quality (Figure 7). These insights extend the findings of Murphy et al (2014), Sanchez et al (2021), Wei et al (2015), and Wu et al (2018) to systematically evaluate negative tones and narrative frames for water.…”

“…Further analyses can consider time lags between news coverage and different types of real-world events and connect how negatively-charged language affects associated behaviors (Cote et al, 2017). For example, Sanchez et al (2021) conducted spatial and bi-gram analyses on a subset of the dataset used in this paper that focused specifically on two natural disaster-related topics: fires and hurricanes. They integrated this newspaper data with temporal data about the magnitude and proximity of those events and determined that, while hurricane-related coverage was positively associated with event magnitude (e.g., disaster declarations, event-related deaths, etc.…”