Abstract
The news media love a disaster (Tarlow, 2011). Even in a world of 24-hour news channels, online news sites, and social media, it is impossible to report all potentially newsworthy events and, as consequence, some types of event take precedence over or are given greater coverage than others. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that, as Miller and Albert (2015) note, much ‘past research has focused almost exclusively on identifying the most important predictors of coverage across many media types, including newsprint, network television news, Internet news sources, Twitter, and Facebook’. It is also not surprising that such research has revealed that, typically, events that involve large-scale death and suffering, such as disasters, will be given prominence over other stories; ‘Disasters are unusual, dramatic, and often have great impact upon people’s lives. This combination makes disasters newsworthy and creates the expectation that news outlets, which are driven by commercial imperatives, will report them’ (van Belle 2000: 50). In other words, as Cockburn (2011) observes, ‘the media generally assume that news of war, crime and natural disasters will always win an audience’, hence the well-known adage in journalism—‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
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