How Loud Rumbles Hit Newsstands: A Data Analysis of Coverage and Spatial Bias in German News about Landslides Around the World

TL;DR

This study analyzes 60,000 German news articles over 25 years to understand coverage patterns and spatial biases in reporting landslides worldwide, highlighting overreporting in certain European regions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of media coverage biases and introduces a dataset for further research on disaster reporting and spatial inequalities.

Findings

Overreporting of landslides in Southern and Western Europe

Correlation between media coverage and countries' landslide susceptibility

Insights into spatial biases in disaster reporting

Abstract

Landslides often hit newsstands due to their destructive and potentially fatal effects. News are a valuable source of information for creating or enriching disaster databases and for expediting media-based studies of the dynamics of media attention. To accomplish that, news datasets must be filtered, geolocated and validated. This paper focuses on how landslides around the world are reported in German newspapers. We analyse almost 60k news articles about 5.5k news events in a 25-year period, compare it with external measures of countries' susceptibility to landslides and provide insights, e.g.~the overreporting of Southern and Western Europe, to foment further studies on inequalities in media attention to international disasters.