Portraying Animals in Disasters: News Media Representations of the Portuguese Wildfires of 2017

Abstract

This article explores how news media report the situation of animals in disasters, focusing on a specific case study: the tragic wildfires that hit Portugal in 2017. Drawing on thematic content analysis of newspapers and primetime television news, we examined, through multivariate Multiple Component Analysis, followed by Cluster analysis, whether the resulting thematic macro-categories clustered around narrative topoi. We propose four portrays of media narratives about animals in wildfires, which highlight their entangled lives with humans: risk, emergency and rescue; emotional relationship and vulnerability; economic relationship and loss; and political and economic (lack of) support. We explore whether these four discursive spaces reinforce or challenge a human-centred approach to the representation of disasters. We argue that insofar as the news value attributed to animals is linked to human experience, as economic or emotional loss, it concurs to erase animals as subjects with interests and lives of their own from the media agenda. We further argue that such type of visibility of animals paradoxically relates to the invisibility of the structural conditions that ultimately contribute to the vulnerability of both humans and nonhumans to disasters. The article ends with recommendations on how to develop compassionate forms of journalism towards other species.