Chapter 5: Discussion
5.3 Comparing the Coverage of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma
where a man was getting ready to evacuate and felt his wife and kids to be panicking. The human interest frame was used when reporting on people’s experiences, and a witness’s experience of near panic.
The low community morale myth was used in conjunction with important politicians visiting affected areas to show support. These reports focused on the French President and Donald Trump going to visit those impacted. Intriguingly the myth was not used in ways that suggested a reluctance to rebuild. On the contrary a willingness to rebuild was reported on; “While rebuilding Barbuda is a daunting task, the alternative of abandoning the island is "crazy,"
Sanders said.” (Sterling and Santiago, 2017). Examining the CNN reports on Irma, it became apparent that instead of suffering from low community morale, the community united after Irma. Indeed, Quarantelli and Dynes (1972:29) contend that “Individual suffering is always experienced in the reference to the plight of others”. This is evident in an article wherein CNN discusses how Irma brought people together: “"We don't have food. We are getting through because the neighbor there, they cook. You know, everybody shares. Everybody comes
us," one woman told TeleCuraçao”
together and they help (Park, 2017). The low community
morale articles for both USA and NON-USA were framed using the political:politician frame.
These articles emphasised the important politicians visiting areas affected and showing solidarity with those who lost everything.
The paralysing shock and helplessness myth was not used. Instead, examples of emergent behaviour were reported on. Some examples include “locals have banded together to clear
storm tasks -
roads and undertake other post ” (Park, 2017). Instead of waiting for rescuers, those Marlatt said plans to restore : “
rescue operations impacted by Irma undertook search and
normalcy hadn't begun yet because they were busy trying to chainsaw through and search for (Park, 2017).
people who may be stuck inside their homes”
Harvey and Irma. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of this study. Looting may or may not have occurred. Quarantelli (2008) has found that in certain conditions, looting will happen. Even so, the looting and anti-social behaviour will be far less than altruistic behaviour. Interestingly enough, while the altruistic frame was frequently used when covering Harvey, the altruistic frame was not utilised by either CNN nor FOX in their coverage of Irma.
The myths that appeared most often in coverage were the myths of looting, panic and anti- social behaviour. These findings correlate with other work on disaster mythology as conducted by Tierney, Bevc and Kuligowski (2006). CNN was more inclined to use disaster myths in their reporting of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, with CNN using significantly more disaster myths when reporting on Hurricane Irma. The prevalence of the anti-social and looting myth in coverage about Irma does raise the question of whether or not the USA centric networks, weary of the rightful criticism after their reporting on Hurricane Katrina, were more reluctant to use the anti-social and looting myths in relation to USA based disasters. Further analysis of this is needed, perhaps using a critical discourse analysis.
Regarding panic as a disaster myth, this research has found that journalists use panic when perhaps words such as fear would be more appropriate. No real instances of panicked behaviour were exhibited in the discourse analysed. Indeed, the instances of so-called panic described in the articles do not meet the accepted norms for panic behaviour and instead meet the criteria for fear. Fear in the face of a natural disaster would be an appropriate response. Given the prevalence of the word panic in modern pop culture, one can only surmise that people use the word panic interchangeably with fear (Tierney et al. 2003). The myth of local organisations being ineffective is used infrequently but appears more prevalent when reporting on Irma.
Because Irma wiped out the entire emergency response infrastructure on some islands, Irma would become what Quarantelli (2008) considered a catastrophe. Local organisations may well have been ineffective after Irma, simply because entire islands were decimated. However, Harvey impacted mainland Texas and did not appear to impede emergency resources.
As previously discussed, CNN appears to be far more inclined to use known disaster myths in their reporting, and the use of these disaster myths in an unexpected finding appeared to correlate to the geographical location that the story was centred around, and fewer myths were present when reporting on disasters that impacted the United States of America. These finding echoes similar findings by Moeller (2006) and Cottle (2009), wherein the argument is made
that ultimately the media, and the newsroom, and the culture of the newsroom dictates whether or not a disaster will be reported on, and if a disaster is reported on, how it will be reported on.
Pantti (2019:2) argues that it must be created for audience consumption and palatable to domestic audiences when creating a story. Given FOX’s primarily domestic audience, this may explain why the newsroom chose to not report on the hurricane damage outside the continental USA. Whereas CNN reported on the damage outside the USA, by interviewing expatriates and tourists, they were able to create stories that appealed to their domestic audiences—using economics as a predicator of coverage (Pantti, 2019:2).
That the islands impacted by Irma are popular among American tourists may also explain why CNN chose to devote a significant proportion of online news articles to Hurricane Irma. Based on literature we know that geographic proximity is not a predictor of whether or not an international disaster is covered by US domestic media. However, research shows severity to be a strong predictor of coverage (Yan and Bissell, 2018:875). If we were to consider the argument made by Yan and Bissell (2018:877) that unreported international disasters were unreported because their degree of severity was less than domestic disasters, it would still not account for the result that CNN chose to cover the international impact of Irma, while FOX chose not to. Instead, FOX chose to focus on the less severe domestic impact of Irma, despite Irma in theory meeting targets of severity by US domestic media. Yan and Bissell (2018:878) contend that media resources are not always equally yoked. Using this argument, one can speculate that FOX’s lack of international Irma coverage might be because FOX lacked the resources to channel into their international coverage of Irma. This in contrast to CNN who appears to place greater emphasis on foreign news and foreign correspondents.
Frames were found to differ depending on the hurricane and network, albeit the differences based on hurricanes were far greater than the differences based on networks when examining the same hurricanes. Both CNN and FOX made use of the human interest frames, when reporting on Hurricane Harvey. CNN was more inclined to use more of the human interest frame when reporting on Harvey; whereas FOX also focused on the economic frame of Harvey.
When the networks reported on Irma, they both networks essentially used the same overarching frames, while the sub categories differed slightly. Both CNN and FOX used the disaster frame, the human interest frame, the environment frame and the political frame, with FOX being more inclined to the political frame.