The Uneven Geography of Compassion in Disaster Reporting

Natural disasters in the media. What makes the front page?

Thousands of victims do not automatically guarantee a place on the world’s front pages. The old, cynical journalistic saying that “the worse it is, the better the story” begins to lose its meaning, though it still carries a grain of truth. What, then, allows a tragedy on the other side of the world to break into the biggest media outlets? As it turns out, the speed with which events unfold also matters, as does how close the affected country feels to us.

A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour shows this clearly. Researchers analyzed 135 million articles from 466 sources in 123 countries and compared them with data on 2,662 natural disasters that took place between 2016 and 2023. The result is a kind of map of global attention. And what does it show?

Earthquakes beat droughts

Foreign media respond most strongly to earthquakes. Landslides and volcanic eruptions follow. Floods and droughts break through far less effectively. For journalists and major media outlets, these disasters look less spectacular. Few people notice that they unfold over longer periods and affect vast areas. They also bring severe consequences for tens of thousands of people.

Does a disaster have to look good?

Why, then, do the media respond differently to hydrometeorological disasters than to geophysical ones? Here the researchers make an important observation:

“Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with geographical proximity or linguistic similarity. It turned out to be primarily about strong personal ties.”

Professor Thiemo Fetzer noted this in a University of Bonn statement.

An earthquake has a spectacular beginning, a climactic moment, and emotionally powerful images that allow the whole story to be told: collapsing buildings, people pulled from the rubble, humanitarian operations, beautiful gestures. All of this is clear, easy to report quickly, and easy to shape into a readable story that usually requires no deep analysis.

Drought struggles to cross borders

Drought is different. Take, for example, the kind now troubling Poland, the United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Italy, or Somalia. Here, the information value seems less gripping and harder to sell in the media, because there is no single moment when everything happens. The effects can be enormous, but its drama is weaker from the point of view of the news cycle.

And this is where we can begin to talk not only about disasters, but also about the media themselves.

Closeness does not mean kilometers

The number of victims still matters, of course: the more people die, the more interest journalists show. But from the perspective of foreign media, not every death “weighs” the same. Here a crucial nuance appears: media outlets write more readily about tragedies affecting so-called “people like us,” even when those people live thousands of kilometers away, than about disasters in places that seem culturally and historically distant.

A disaster affecting “our own” weighs more

The researchers point here to the phenomenon known as cultural distance. It means that, for a potential media audience, a disaster can feel closer when it affects a society they know, understand, or have encountered in some way. A comparable tragedy in a place perceived as foreign may stir much weaker emotions, including among journalists themselves.

Sometimes a media decision — we will show this, but not that — happens almost unconsciously. Practical possibilities shape it as well. Here we have a correspondent, there we do not. Here we can get photographs, there we cannot. The competition covered that story, while this one might give us our own exclusive angle.

The researchers, Professor Thiemo Fetzer and Prashant Garg, argue that this creates a kind of toxic system. It not only distorts reality in a certain way, but also assigns it a hierarchy.

We see some tragedies more often

Most people will probably never personally experience the suffering caused by major cataclysms such as an earthquake or a destructive flood in a distant country. Their ideas about these threats form through media information. So when some kinds of disasters receive more space than others, the social map of danger stops reflecting real threats. It becomes a map of sensational stories that sell well in the media.

This is how a filter of compassion is formed

This is not merely the sad conclusion of the researchers’ large-scale analysis. It is also an important warning signal: we live in a world where many hydrometeorological threats often affect entire communities. Even when they do not look very media-friendly, or at least look less visually striking than a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, their consequences for local communities are often just as catastrophic.

The most important conclusion one can also draw from the study is that empathy works unevenly, too. What the media show creates a filter of compassion and a form of selection among audiences. And that selection has consequences. It shapes which world we can notice, what we fear, what we talk about, and what we consider important. That is why the way we portray natural disasters in the media matters far beyond the news cycle itself.

Read this article in Polish: Powódź, susza, trzęsienie ziemi. Co przyciąga uwagę wielkich mediów?