Droughts and media: when and how do the newspapers talk about the droughts in England?

Abstract

The United Kingdom is traditionally known for its wet climate, but droughts are also a recurring concern. Using newspapers as the medium of public communication, this study explores the timing and content of newspaper articles about droughts in England. We constructed a corpus of more than 800 newspaper articles related to droughts in England for the last 24 years (2000-2023) and analysed the temporal alignment of newspaper coverage with hydroclimatic anomalies and seasonality using a negative binomial regression model. Our results show that newspaper coverage of droughts coincides with the short-term shortage of precipitation (SPI-3) and groundwater (SGI-1) in spring/summer seasons, although temperature (CET-12) was not a significant factor. Using topic modelling, we explored narratives found in the texts such as “Drought and hosepipe ban”, a common measure used to restrict water usage in England during periods of hydrological drought. Comparing two major droughts (i.e. spring 2012 vs summer 2022), we found the summer drought of 2022 to contain more summer-related topics (i.e. “Heatwave”, “Temperature and hosepipe ban”), which underpins our statistical analysis, suggesting that warm seasons garner more media attention. Overall, our findings reveal that newspaper reporting on droughts is influenced by a combination of factors rather than precipitation alone, with a notable seasonality-based component that may reflect confirmation bias in reporting on droughts. This in turn implies a potential mismatch in how droughts are conceptualised by newspapers compared to scientists and may under-represent early signs of drought in cold seasons, potentially undermining public support for preventive measures at these times of year.