Abstract
The news media love a disaster (Tarlow, 2011). Even in a world of 24-hour news channels, online news sites, and social media, it is impossible to report all potentially newsworthy events and, as consequence, some types of event take precedence over or are given greater coverage than others. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that, as Miller and Albert (2015) note, much ‘past research has focused almost exclusively on identifying the most important predictors of coverage across many media types, including newsprint, network television news, Internet news sources, Twitter, and Facebook’. It is also not surprising that such research has revealed that, typically, events that involve large-scale death and suffering, such as disasters, will be given prominence over other stories; ‘Disasters are unusual, dramatic, and often have great impact upon people’s lives. This combination makes disasters newsworthy and creates the expectation that news outlets, which are driven by commercial imperatives, will report them’ (van Belle 2000: 50). In other words, as Cockburn (2011) observes, ‘the media generally assume that news of war, crime and natural disasters will always win an audience’, hence the well-known adage in journalism—‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
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Notes
- 1.
The student house has remained a popular topic in the Italian press (Il Centro 2015; Iilfattoquotidiano 2015), specifically with regard to recent proceedings at La Corte d’Appello (Court of Appeal, L’Aquila) in which four defendants have had their original four-year sentences confirmed. Despite little evidence to support the case, the defendants were accused of being responsible for the deaths of the students as they had allegedly failed to carry out work to ensure the safety of the building. However, the student house has remained a popular media symbol of the earthquake, and hence, these individuals may have fallen victim to the power of the media. What is certain is that the continuous media attention paid to the student house, through these court proceedings, has maintained its role as a tourist attraction.
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Sharpley, R., Wright, D. (2018). Disasters and Disaster Tourism: The Role of the Media. In: R. Stone, P., Hartmann, R., Seaton, T., Sharpley, R., White, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_14
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