Role of Media in Managing Disasters

The media has become a major determinant of disaster response and has been implicated as having contributed to secondary trauma. The traditional media include newspapers, television, and radio. Although traditional media historically served as an instrument of public awareness of disaster events, more recently the role of traditional and new media has become transformational in its catalytic role in mobilizing public response to disaster.

Since the advent of cable network news, near real-time video reporting from the scene of disasters provides a major source of “data” on disaster situations, even for public policy officials. In the cases of the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquakes in Haiti, and other disasters, video news reports provided the earliest situational awareness to major public officials. Advances in telecommunications combined with the financing available for investigative reporting provided by large media companies meant that the media were often the first source of information available postdisaster. The phenomenon called the CNN effect reflects the fact that major news (video) reporting has become a driver of public policy, especially as it relates to disaster management and response. Though the extent of the media's influence is debatable and probably highly contextual, disaster management strategies are developed with great focus on the role of the media.

Most disaster management teams have media liaisons, and emergency operations centers have organized press conferences as well as coordination policies for media. Disaster management leaders work hard to ensure that media are well informed of disaster management efforts, and at the same time, they often rely on the media for situational awareness and for communicating public information. Working with the media is one of the more challenging activities of a disaster management executive team because the incentives of media professionals to find sensational stories are often counter to disaster management efforts to maintain stability and focus on the disaster response.

The ubiquitous presence of the media in response to disaster events also establishes the potential to create secondary trauma among media viewers. Research demonstrated that effect in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the realtime video and continuous reporting of traumatic events led to trauma well beyond those immediately affected by the disaster.

More recently, news media and social media have become a powerful force in disaster management. Specifically, crowd sourcing combines new advances in information technologies, including mobile computing and the Internet with social networking concepts. Emergent tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are used by those affected by disaster as well as by the global community to report on and respond to disasters. Text messaging has served as a powerful tool to allow data to be communicated from the scene of a disaster. Leysia Palen and colleagues, in “Crisis in a Networked World: Features of Computer-Mediated Communication in the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech Event,” have shown that social networking tools, including text messaging, were used by students to unscramble the Virginia Polytechnic Institute shooting disaster in 2007 as effectively as official investigative efforts.

During the Haiti disaster of 2010, the power and potential of crowd sourcing/social media was demonstrated in a number of ways that showed how organic emergency response can be potentiated through technology and social networking. Text messaging combined with the establishment of virtual networks of volunteer translators and amateur geographers created near real-time flows of information from affected areas and among the global public. Crisis mapping activities such as the Ushahidi Haiti project brought thousands of volunteers around the world together to facilitate the capture, analysis, and widespread dissemination of disaster response needs on the ground and local/internationally available resources to respond. The rapid establishment of an emergency short message service (SMS) short code resulted in makeshift 911 emergency reporting systems. Unlike 911 (4636 in Haiti), however, informal social networks attempted to match disaster response resources with identified needs, which is more complex than tying an official emergency response system to emergency calls.

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