Crisis and Disaster Coverage

Abstract

Stories of disaster with widespread destruction have been part of journalism since the profession's inception. Disaster coverage is emotional by nature, and major disasters receive immediate and massive global coverage today. The journalism literature has established that the news media play an important role in how disasters become understood and responded to. This entry examines the main concerns of journalism scholarship vis‐à‐vis disasters. In particular it focuses on how the institutional, ideological, and economic structures of journalists' work shape the ways they report on disasters. The entry addresses questions such as how a disaster becomes news, which disasters attract media coverage and which do not, how disasters and their victims are represented in the news coverage, how journalists could report disasters in ways that generate empathy and action, and how digital technologies improve and democratize the reporting of disasters.