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.
Highlights
Using a corpus of 600K+ articles from local newspapers, we extend the evaluation of the relationship between media coverage and event magnitude/proximity to include a comparative analysis of how these relationships may vary between fires and hurricanes, which has not been conducted to date [13] and remains a technical gap in the field of disaster and media coverage research
Water quality and water mains are more prominent for fire-related coverage, while hurricane coverage is more concerned with food and rising water issues (Figure 4)
Our study is one of the first to perform a large-scale, data-driven comparative analysis of how water resources are discussed during fires and hurricanes
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Water security is defined by the United Nations as the ability to safeguard adequate quantities of clean water to sustain the livelihoods and the health of a population [1]. Without access to adequate quantities of clean water, societal risks include reduced agricultural productivity, reduced nutritional value of food, water scarcity, and higher exposure to pathogens [2]. One of the greatest threats to water security comes in the form of natural disasters, which have been increasing in frequency and severity over the last few decades [3,4,5,6]
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