Natural Disasters, Coverage of

Coverage of disasters regularly appears in the top 10 news stories followed by U.S. citizens. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was No. 2 (behind the September 11, 2001 attacks) in the Pew Centre’s “Public’s Top Stories of the Decade 2001-2010,” while the U.S. public were more interested in Hurricane Sandy in 2012 than in the presidential election campaign of that year. It is likely that media coverage of the 2019–2020 Australian bush fires and the 2019 wildfires in California was avidly followed by the public too. In popular culture, the disaster movie is still a box office staple. The drama and danger inherent in floods, earthquakes, [Page 1064]droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis, and wildfires produce compelling narratives that grip the public like few other topics. Natural disasters also ...