Understanding News Geography and Major Determinants of Global News Coverage of Disasters

TL;DR

This study analyzes the global news coverage of disasters using a large multilingual dataset, revealing the influence of demographic, political, and damage-related factors, and highlighting regional biases in news geography.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of global disaster news coverage and identifies key determinants, emphasizing the importance of regionalism and large-scale data.

Findings

Population size influences news coverage

Political stability affects disaster reporting

Regional biases are prominent in news geography

Abstract

In this work, we reveal the structure of global news coverage of disasters and its determinants by using a large-scale news coverage dataset collected by the GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone) project that monitors news media in over 100 languages from the whole world. Significant variables in our hierarchical (mixed-effect) regression model, such as the number of population, the political stability, the damage, and more, are well aligned with a series of previous research. Yet, strong regionalism we found in news geography highlights the necessity of the comprehensive dataset for the study of global news coverage.