Introduction

When Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, erupted on April 10, 1815, several months passed before news of the disaster became widely known. The eruption, which produced a column of ash reaching 45 kilometers into the stratosphere, remains the largest ever recorded volcanic disaster in human history. It contributed to a major disruption in global temperatures and to the deaths of nearly 100,000 people. On August 31, 1883, Mount Krakatoa, also in Indonesia, erupted violently as well, setting off a tsunami that killed nearly 40,000 people who inhabited the islands of the Sunda Strait region between Java and Sumatra. Strong waves were reported as far away as France, barometers peaked in Bogota and Washington, and bodies washed ashore in Zanzibar (Winchester, 2005). Beyond the objective severity of both disasters, measured by the losses of life and transformative environmental impacts, what distinguishes them is how quickly word spread of the Krakatoa eruption. Owing to innovations in media technologies and institutions, namely advances in telegraphy, the laying of undersea cables, and flourishing global news agencies, citizens in the world’s more advanced nations learned about the disaster within moments of its happening. Response and recovery efforts could be undertaken and adjustments to international trade routes adjusted. The eruption of Krakatoa was effectively the first global geological media event in history.

On November 10, 1979, a train derailed in the City of Mississauga, located just west of Toronto, and an evacuation order was initiated after one car BLEVEed (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion), threatening to release styrene, toluene, caustic soda, propane, chlorine, and other highly toxic chemicals into the local environment. The Peel Regional Police Force was the agency responsible for directing the disaster response and public evacuation, and the officer in charge of operations, a duty inspector, came to the scene as soon as he had been notified about the accident. His first concern was establishing an adequate command post from which to coordinate emergency responders, direct the distribution of contamination and hazard control, facilitate an evacuation of the area, and prepare for eventual investigation and recovery. Yet, keenly aware of the importance of the mass media to both public notification and crisis management, his second priority was to establish a media center at the accident scene to ensure the disaster would be controlled and handled effectively. Thus, even before a full threat assessment could be completed, a media relations plan had already been identified as a key element of the crisis response strategy (Scanlon & Hiscott, 1985).

In October 2007, a series of wildfires beginning in Malibu, California blazed a trail of devastation across much of Orange County toward San Diego and the Mexico border. The fires destroyed nearly 1,500 homes and burned over half a million acres of land, causing enormous economic losses and mass evacuations. One of the biggest challenges for residents in disaster areas is the lack of access to reliable, up-to-date, official information necessary for ensuring their safety and protection. Traditional media coverage often responds to the needs of people to know what’s happening and can generate national, and sometimes international, attention to local events. This can be important for raising money to support post-disaster recovery and for placing the spotlight onto failures in governance or decision making that can precipitate the occurrence of these events. But news coverage itself is an insufficient source of information for most people who are directly affected by disasters. It can be slow, sensationalized, and deferential to the views of authorities rather to than the needs of the population. In the case of the Malibu wildfires, residents relied much more on local online community boards and other “back channel” information portals than traditional news sites. These portals provided more timely, locally relevant information that supported emergency response needs at a time when it was most urgent (Sutton, Palen, & Shklovski, 2008).

These examples, drawn from different places and moments in time, help illustrate the varied and important roles that media play in disaster and emergency situations. From global communication infrastructures to legacy news organizations, community forums, mobile platforms, and social networking sites, media are an essential part of effective warning and alert systems and a key piece of the broader disaster information landscape. They provide a window to dramatic events that happen either a continent or a mile away, and they afford a space in which various actors (governments, humanitarian organizations, civic groups, and corporations) struggle to shape and determine the meaning and impact of these events on our lives. When disaster strikes, the ability to provide accurate, reliable, and credible information to reduce risks to populations, to mobilize response efforts and, ultimately, to save lives, is vital. Effective communication during a disaster is also important to ensuring credibility and trust—that the population will trust the authorities to protect the public as its first priority at a time when lives may hang in the balance. Media are also important to the construction of an “imagined community” of fate (Anderson, 1990) through which people are bonded by a shared experience, however traumatic these may be. Whether it’s radio, television, Facebook, or short message services (SMS), media help keep people in affected areas and around the world informed about the state of an emergency as it unfolds, supports response and resource mobilization, provides a way for authorities to listen to the needs of affected populations, and foster a shared sense of identification.

This article focuses on these and other issues in the study of media and disasters. Specifically, it explores the role of disaster journalism and the impact of globalization on transnational media flows and disaster representations. It addresses the notion that a particular “media logic” shapes, in deep and profound ways, our understanding of disaster events. Finally, it considers the impact of new and emergent technologies such as online news, mobile phones, social networking, and open data platforms, and how these innovations have facilitated the creation of new disaster information ecosystems and social mobilization processes.

Disaster Journalism and the Public Imaginary

In his now famous study of media and public opinion, Walter Lippmann wrote, “the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 8). Lippmann was writing about how media shape our perceptions of social and political affairs, and of the importance for political elites to understand this process if they wish to govern effectively—but he may well have been writing about the pictures we form in our heads about disasters, especially those that occur in far-flung places beyond our direct, lived experience. Some of these pictures “come from deeply rooted cultural beliefs,” yet for the vast majority of people—public officials, journalists, and ordinary citizens—our understanding of disasters, and our views about how they’re caused, the reactions they produce, and the effects they create, “are primarily if not exclusively learned from mass media accounts” (Quarantelli, 1991, p. 2).

What is the nature of these accounts? How do media frame the meaning and significance of disasters? How are these events transformed from what are often local, space-bound happenings with many different dimensions into coherent stories that can be easily understood and retold? What does the framing and narrative construction of these events—as stories of corruption, failures of governance, accounts of “mother nature,” tales about the random and tragic nature of modernity, etc.—tell us about how media constitute and shape what and how we should think about disasters? When a disaster occurs, newsrooms move into action: reporters rush to the scene, where they work their sources, scour the Internet for clues and tips, and do anything and everything they can to determine what happened, who was affected, and who may be responsible. Occasionally, media will explore issues relating to pre-disaster readiness (could this have been anticipated?) and post-disaster recovery (where do we go from here?). Very often, they will chronicle and tell a story about the chaos and devastation of the event, with constant updates about damage to infrastructure, tallies of bodies injured and lives lost, and forecasts about dire economic consequences (e.g., Houston, Pfefferbaum, & Rosenholtz, 2012). Frequently, these accounts will reflect the relative power and influence of different stakeholders—victims may be prominent, but their definitional influence will be secondary to those of the authorities. The complex story of disasters are often specifically time-bound and immediate, which should not be surprising given the event-centered nature of so much news coverage. But it also rubs uncomfortably against the normative desire for a more complete picture of the social, structural, political, or economic factors that are often at play in any given disaster, regardless of whether the event was caused by climactic forces, failures in governance, weak regulations, or the personal failings of political or corporate leaders.

Disaster reportage tends to follow distinct narrative patterns, and our understanding of these patterns affords insight into processes of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. In their research on media coverage of airline crashes, Vincent, Crow, and Davis (1989) argue that the narrative arc of disaster stories has three phases: disruption of normalcy; investigation of mystery; and restoration of normalcy. For Miller and Riechert (2000), journalists need different kinds of information during each phase, and they rely on different sources to help complete the story (to construct the “pictures in our heads”) depending on whichever phase of disaster they are in. In the immediate aftermath (i.e., disruption of normalcy), preferred sources are eyewitnesses who can provide a detailed account of the devastation: What happened? What did it “feel like” when that happened? What did you see? Official sources also help to establish the facts of the event (here’s what we know now), but their role is generally secondary to those of eyewitnesses, who, through the reporter, help bring the audience to the scene. This role positioning changes as the narrative evolves. In the investigation phase, experts, government sources, or official company spokespeople are relied upon more heavily, to help put the facts of what happened into context and to lay out a framework for what will occur next. Family members may also be used during this second phase of a disaster to give the coverage added emotional texture, reminding readers of the human toll of the tragedy. Finally, in the post-event, disaster-restoration phase, official sources typically maintain their definitional influence by providing explanations for what went wrong, assurances that mistakes, if they occurred, won’t be repeated, and promises to provide some measure of resolution and/or amelioration to those affected. On occasion, conflict may also ensue among stakeholders if the source of the crisis is a severe lapse in duty to protect the public, or an unwillingness to accept responsibility for wrongdoing.

Disaster journalism often falls short of providing the kind of reporting we should expect or require for understanding how or why these events occur, the different impacts they have, and how to prevent them from happening in the future. Analyzing a decade of U.S. news coverage, Houston et al. (2012) show that hurricanes, floods, wildfires or winter storms generate far less critical scrutiny than oil spills, industrial accidents, or terrorist attacks. Whereas natural disasters are often framed as random occurrences with no obvious causal agent, man-made crises are more easily narrated, presumably because of the ready availability of identifiable villains and victims. Their research also showed that while media coverage of pre-disaster events provide helpful warnings and information on how to be prepared, coverage of recovery and reconstruction is comparatively weaker, with far less attention given to what precipitated the disaster and the impact it will have on communities trying to recover and rebuild: “What happens and is needed in the first few days of a disaster may not be what happens or is needed several months later,” (Houston et al., 2012, p. 609). Other scholars have pointed to similar limitations. Quarantelli (1981) attributes problematic media coverage to what he called the “command post” perspective—relying more heavily on emergency response personnel than survivors for an account of what happened. In addition to reinforcing the views of official, authoritative sources, this approach ignores non-official activities such as search and rescue efforts led by volunteers and ordinary citizens.

The modern mediascape is characterized by a blurring of the boundaries between print, broadcast, and digital media, and increasingly between and among legacy news organizations, social media platforms that aggregate both professional and citizen reporting, blogs, and other non-traditional media outlets. These changes alter the terrain in which sources shape coverage, the possibilities for how journalists tell stories, and how the public learns about what happened. While media have arguably never been as fractured and fragmented as they are today, they have also never been more ever-present. The ubiquity of media in our lives has helped constitute a public disaster imaginary: 24/7 news channels and social media platforms enable greater and freer circulation of images and accounts of humanitarian crises or disasters from distant locations at an instant as geospatial satellites document and render disasters more “observable” and “knowable” (Cottle, 2009; Rai & Cottle, 2010). In 2011, Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, was able to get images of the destruction caused by the tsunami into the hands of news organizations within a few short hours. In 2013, during Typhoon Haiyan, Google released a crisis map and SMS-enabled “people finder” to help track the storm and allow families and friends to search for loved ones. Calhoun (2008) argues that media saturation has led to a shift towards interpretations of crises or emergencies as more “sudden, unpredictable events that require immediate action,” rather than as issues and problems that develop over longer periods of time, “and are not merely predictable but are watched for weeks or months or years before they break into public consciousness or onto the agendas of policy makers” (p. 83). The public fixation on emergency events is facilitated by the focus on a disaster’s most acute phase, thus rendering its structural dimensions less visible.

Disasters are intertwined with the course of human affairs in ways that were unimaginable decades ago. The rapid global movement of capital and standardization of information, the increasingly networked systems of global communication, the connection between disasters and geo-political interests, and the internationalization of poverty and marginalization all have a bearing on our interpretation of these events (Alexander, 2005; Cottle, 2014). The effects of disasters are farther reaching, and our perceptions of them as more regular, intense, and immediate are more profound than they have ever been (Beck, 2006). Media audiences are also more globalized, with populations spreading the world over through patterns of international migration and refugee settlement.

Media Globalization and Disasters

Media Representations of Disaster

The Impact of New ICTs in Disaster Reporting and Response

The proliferation of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has had a significant impact on disaster journalism, crisis response, and incident management. Increased accessibility to mobile phones and the emergence of social media platforms like Twitter, open data portals, and new information networks have dramatically shifted the mediascape that both constitute and are shaped by emergency events. Internet, social media, and mobile phones have enhanced the speed and accessibility of information during a disaster. Yet, at the same time, these media have also created new opportunities for monitoring and surveillance and have disrupted the ability of states and other powerful actors to tightly manage public perceptions of disaster response.

To illustrate, Cottle (2014) compares the large volume of information and eyewitness accounts that emerged after Hurricane Nagris swept through Burma in 2008 with the news blackout imposed by Chinese authorities after the enormous and destructive earthquake that struck Tangshan in 1976. The speed and availability of information that are afforded by new technologies, combined with the ability of citizens to provide real-time eyewitness accounts of these events, have enabled the proliferation of a multitude of sources of information no longer constrained to traditional gatekeepers of information. However, although new media have arguably democratized the production of and access to information, it hasn’t replaced the vital role that mainstream media play in providing vital life-saving information and reporting on the unfolding of a disaster to an international audience. Covering disasters, particularly in far-away places, is time and resource-intensive, and while citizen accounts from these regions are important particularly in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, properly resourced reportage is crucial to obtaining a fuller, more complete picture of what happened, what the consequences will be, and who may be responsible.

Governments can use social media effectively to mobilize communities, support humanitarian groups, receive feedback from affected populations, and disseminate information, however citizens are most often the main beneficiaries of these technologies. International studies of disasters have documented numerous cases in which ordinary citizens play key roles in disaster response, largely supported by the affordances of newer, mobile technologies. During a five-day media ban following a controversial election in Kenya, social media provided a means for citizens to act as on-the-ground reporters who both produced and curated information (Hughes, Palen, & Peterson, 2013). During the protests, citizen reports of protest activity and violence were published well before traditional media channels reported them. Similarly, the first widely available video footage of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China was taken not by a reporter from China Central Television, but by an undergraduate student using a camera phone (Hughes et al., 2013). Finally, in their study of the 2009 l’Anquila earthquake, Farinosie and Trere (2014) argue that citizen journalists are crucial for countering traditional media misinformation in the aftermath of a disaster.

On the one hand, the coverage is seen as overabundant, especially in the first days following the disaster, when conventional media were bombarding audiences with so much information that it was hard to obtain a clear picture of the situation. On the other hand, citizen journalists feel that the mainstream coverage of local events is bad, incomplete, almost entirely pro-government—this is the main reason why they provide their own version of the facts.

(Farinosie & Trere, 2014, p. 80)

While there is enormous potential to harness social and mobile media to improve communication flows and facilitate social mobilization during a disaster, there are also important drawbacks and limitations. False information may be an inherent problem, given the number of people creating information at the same time, and often with different interests and vantage points. Out-dated, inaccurate, or false information not only increase in scale, but also they can complicate situational awareness of an incident and consequently hinder or slow response efforts (Lindsay, 2011). Further, as Tierney (2014) argues, social media does not automatically provide the coordination capability for easily synchronizing and sharing information, resources, and plans among disparate relief organizations. While crowd-sourcing platforms such as Ushahidi are attempting to resolve this problem, humanitarian agencies, governments, and local communities are also working to develop platforms that will ensure information flows are reciprocal, providing agencies an ability to disseminate information and also have capacity to listen to affected populations. Authentication of information from credible sources is also crucial because of the obvious risks associated with an unregulated stream of information, especially as misinformation can spread rapidly online (Navarez, 2012). As is often the case, disasters present a context in which uncertainty and high stress is prevalent, which is why information ideally needs to be transparent, accurate, and easily and quickly accessible.

Another possible limitation of social media has to do with the infrastructural requirements of sustaining an internet-based network, which may be vulnerable to damage during a disaster. Also, depending on the demographics of a disaster area, affected communities may not have access to technologies in the first place. Within hours of the Fukushima earthquake, social media applications were set up to find survivors, to connect communities with humanitarian relief, and to recruit and mobilize volunteers:

A combination of high internet penetration and 3G mobile usage, along with the rapid roll-out of internet-based information initiatives, created a lifeline for those in areas with internet connectivity and power. Those with enough power to use mobile and smartphones were able to access information announcements, contact friends and relatives, and access information about the wider dimensions of the disaster.

(Appleby, 2013, p. 10)

Yet, despite the rapid mobilization and accessibility of ICTs in Japan, the impact of social media was limited by large-scale power outages and damaged telecommunications infrastructure. Moreover, use of these technologies was further hampered by the population demographics of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, the areas that suffered the most damage and were in greatest need of assistance. These areas are predominantly rural, with an aging population that were unaccustomed to the affordances of social media.

Conclusions

While mass media are quick to carry coverage of all kinds of emergency events, the attention they devote to any given disaster situation is likely to be determined by who is affected, where it occurred and the type of incident involved. Because the dominant international media language is English and the main global media nerve centers are located in London and New York, media attention is more likely to be sustained if an event occurs in the West or affects westerners in one way or another. When an event is seen as important, media are likely to converge on the scene and commit significant resources to the coverage. This works well when there is a specific site that’s accessible—conversely, this is much more difficult in disasters and catastrophes when there is no obvious site or when the event has disrupted communications and transportation. Unfortunately, media coverage is often distorted by the inaccurate assumption that, in times of emergency, people are likely to panic or will be unable to cope with the stress of the event. Most news organizations are either blissfully unaware or unable to acknowledge that survivors are far more likely to help than to hinder an emergency response—stories of death, despair, and tragedy may be more compelling than stories of coping with loss and supporting others, but this doesn’t make them true. Media coverage of disasters has painted a picture in our heads of panic, chaos, and the contagion of paralyzing fear. There is little to no empirical research that supports this view.

Despite these concerns and the limitations of media coverage, news organizations can and do play an important role in emergencies. They are essential to providing early warnings, and they often afford a key link between the public and official sources. The focus on a specific event can also lead to changes in emergency response, including accelerating opportunities for humanitarian assistance. Media attention is also more likely to happen if the incident appears to have occurred suddenly, such as in a terrorist attack, rather than cases that are slower to develop, like a famine or drought. Shamefully, when media lose interest, so do the authorities and populations who are not directly affected or impacted by what happened. All the while, media provide an important arena or environment in which different policy actors—state and supranational agencies, humanitarian groups, citizen journalists, and others—struggle to capture, chronicle, and define the event in ways that are consonant with their interests and views. A critical understanding of the role media play in disasters has to include some understanding about the politics underlying emergency media coverage.

The increased availability, speed, and saturation of media attention have had a profound effect on the coverage of disasters and the role of communication technologies in disaster response. New communication technologies are reshaping both the global and local experience of a crisis, and infusing disaster communications with new voices and perspectives. Social media networks, in particular, are enabling emergency response agencies to focus their efforts and resources, challenging erroneous official claims and insufficient government response, and mobilizing the international community to provide support at an unprecedented scale. And mobile media present opportunities for situational awareness that were never conceivable in the past. Nonetheless, despite all the hope and optimism, it is important to note that the potential that new ICTs hold for disaster response and mobilization have to be tempered by the realities on the ground, where digital access, infrastructure, policy frameworks, and disaster demographics truly limit their potential and promise.