I have lots of thoughts after reading the paper,
“News Droughts, News Floods, and US Disaster Relief”, written by Eisensee and
Stromberg in 2007. The methodology used in this paper is very innovative and
inspirational that the authors used Olympic Games as an instrument variable,
and lots of other economic studies can borrow their methodology idea. However,
I would like to talk more about the results brought out by this paper. This
paper studies the media coverage across different types of disasters and
different regions in the US. The results seem very brutal to me that it leads
to a serious issue that people’s lives are not treated equally.
|
Share in news
|
Equal coverage casualties ratio
|
|
|
Volcano
|
0.30
|
1
|
|
Earthquake
|
0.33
|
2
|
|
Fire
|
0.14
|
12
|
|
Storm
|
0.14
|
280
|
|
Flood
|
0.09
|
674
|
|
Landslide
|
0.07
|
882
|
|
Epidemic
|
0.02
|
1696
|
|
Drought
|
0.04
|
2395
|
|
Cold wave
|
0.06
|
3150
|
|
Food shortage
|
0.03
|
38920
|
|
Share in news
|
Equal coverage casualties ratio
|
|
|
Europe
|
0.18
|
1
|
|
S. and C. America
|
0.18
|
3
|
|
Asia
|
0.13
|
43
|
|
Africa
|
0.04
|
45
|
|
Pacific
|
0.03
|
91
|
1 person killed by volcano gets the same media
coverage as 38920 people killed by food shortage, and 1 person killed in Europe
has the same media coverage as 91 people killed in Pacific. Such result shows
enormous inequality of getting media coverage. Getting more media coverage can
help to gain more support and aids, as more media coverage can draw more public
attention. However, as we know in general more common events are less likely to
get more media coverage, more common disastrous events get less media coverage
and less social support, while more common events are the most disastrous.
The results imply people suffering from more
common events receive less media coverage and less likely to receive sufficient
support and aids.
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