Newspaper reporting of space weather: End of a golden age

Abstract

The reporting of the human impacts of space weather phenomena as a significant American newspaper story has passed through a golden age, which ended just after World War II. Prior to this time, significant geomagnetic storms and solar flare events were reported in considerable detail, with specific references made to actual impacts to telegraph, wireless, and radio communications systems among others. After World War II, news stories shrank dramatically in terms of the size of the article, the location of the story in the newspaper, and the number of items mentioned in the article. This paper is an historical analysis of the scope of newspaper reporting on 52 major storms with AA* > 170 occurring in American newspapers since 1870 and the changing trends in how the events were covered. I will show that even before the advent of news reporting on the World Wide Web, there was a precipitous decline in space weather reporting during the postwar period from ca. 1945--1990. The reason for this decline is not immediately obvious, but a few suggestions will be provided. I also publish 141 excerpts from the newspaper sample highlighting a variety of "human impacts" caused by this complete sample of storm events, along with a small collection of interesting illustrations that accompanied a few of the articles. Copyright 2007 by the American Geophysical Union.