Abstract
Previous research suggests that lesson-drawing news coverage of disasters can create windows of opportunity for policy learning in the observing communities. This is especially important for cities facing similar vulnerabilities to disaster-affected communities, where they can learn from their events to pursue disaster risk reduction policies to mitigate against those risks at home. However, little is known about the conditions under which newspapers in at-risk communities provide the type of news coverage necessary for policy learning. Using logistic regression to analyze an original dataset produced from a content analysis of five newspapers’ coverage of five earthquakes, we demonstrate that the level of development of the disaster-stricken community systematically influences the nature of news coverage in at-risk communities. These results have important implications for the understanding of urban disaster risk reduction, suggesting that the conditions for bottom-up policy learning are more likely to occur following disasters in wealthier countries.
Highlights
Disasters are rare events that have significant effects on affected communities
The results indicate clear support for the theory that development influences the nature of coverage of distant disasters
We discuss the findings in greater detail and the implications for the prospect of disaster risk reduction in observing communities
Summary
Disasters are rare events that have significant effects on affected communities. Previous research suggests that lesson-drawing news coverage of disasters can create windows of opportunity for policy learning in observing communities [1,2,3,4,5]. We seek to understand the conditions under which news outlets draw lessons from the disasters experienced by distant communities. This is important because most people do not experience disasters first-hand, but instead rely on mediated depictions of distant events. The news media set the terms for debate over distant disasters, building narratives about disaster risk through their interpretation of those events for local audiences. We define this process as localization: The practice of interpreting and reporting distant events by relating them to their local audience. Some scholars treat domestication and localization as synonyms, we argue that they are distinct concepts
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