| Summary: | Using the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami as a case study, this paper considers how natural
disasters are covered in the media in order to develop a better understanding of disaster
reporting. The analysis builds upon Alexa Robertson’s 2008 study of television coverage of the tsunami. Data was collected through a content analysis of three daily Canadian newspapers in the
three months immediately following the tsunami. The findings show that although there are some
notable differences between newspapers, simply catering to the same type of audience (i.e.
national) is no guarantee that coverage from different newspapers will produce similar trends.
However, the research did identify four trends across the three newspapers studied: pieces that
are framed as political stories and critical of the government are not necessarily fuelled by
inherent political bias, at least with regard to a foreign natural disaster; in the immediate
aftermath of a disaster, the abundance of dramatic stories that can be told raises the threshold
with regard to the level of drama a disaster story must have in order to be printed; recovery
stories are generally re-framed as aid stories, thereby making it easier to relate the story to the
audience, and; there does not seem to be any pattern to when a disaster disappears from
newspapers’ front pages, as even an anniversary commemorating a disaster is no assurance of
front page coverage. This study found that although narrative arcs in disaster reporting follow similar patterns across newspapers, other aspects of disaster coverage – such as the quantity or location of coverage – vary from newspaper to newspaper.
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