Van Belle
Race and Media Coverage of Disasters
3
oriented policies, policies designed to alter the perceptions, myths and beliefs associated with
race, are indicated as the options with the greater chance to generate change. If the effects of
race seem to vanish when distanced from local economics and socio-political competition,
then economically-oriented policies, construed in the broadest sense of altering the economic
context of social and political interaction, are a more likely avenue to effect what changes
might be desired.
This study offers two analyses to inform both the study of international news flows
and the more general debate regarding the effects of race on society. First, using a
comprehensive dataset that catalogues foreign disasters from 1964 to 1995,
1
the issue of race
and the volume of New York Times coverage of foreign disasters is addressed. A second
analysis examines the content of coverage from a random sample of the disasters in the data
set to explore the possibility that there is a qualitative difference that might be associated with
the racial make up of the victimized population.
Na tural Disa sters a nd th e Stud y of Media Coverag e
As the authors of several previous studies have argued (Adams 1986; Gaddy and
Tanjong 1986; Singer, Endreny, and Glassman 1991; Van_Belle 2000), natural disasters
provide an excellent, perhaps even the ideal context for studying factors related to news
coverage. Disasters are unplanned events that are consistently newsworthy and can be
identified through extra-media sources. This creates opportunities to conduct event-based
rather than coverage-based analyses. In an event-based analysis the characteristics of the
events can be used to isolate or control for the effects of a variety of factors related to news
media coverage. Most importantly, an event-based analysis also creates a situation where
what might be called the null-case bias, can be avoided.
One of the most obvious values of an event-based analysis is the ability to generate a
set of cases from what (Rosgren 1970; Rosgren 1974; Rosgren 1977) refers to as extra-media
1
These data are from Richard S. Olson and A. Cooper Drury (1997) and a heartfelt thank-you is extended to
both authors for generously providing them for this analysis.
Convention