Seismic risk: the biases of earthquake media coverage

Devès, Maud H.; Le Texier, Marion; Pécout, Hugues; Grasland, Claude

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2-125-2019

Articles | Volume 2, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2-125-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2-125-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 2, issue 2

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

15 Aug 2019

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 15 Aug 2019

Seismic risk: the biases of earthquake media coverage

Maud H. Devès, Marion Le Texier, Hugues Pécout, and Claude Grasland

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Final revised paper (published on 15 Aug 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 17 Apr 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'REVIEW - Seismic Risk: The Biases of Earthquake Media Coverage - IAIN STEWART', Iain Stewart, 09 May 2019
- AC1: 'Authors response to the reviews', Maud Devès, 04 Jul 2019
RC2: 'REVIEW - Seismic Risk: The Biases of Earthquake Media Coverage - Lisa Matthias', Lisa Matthias, 14 May 2019
- AC2: 'Response to the review by Lisa Matthias', Maud Devès, 04 Jul 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish as is (06 Jul 2019) by Jon Tennant (deceased)

ED: Publish as is (06 Jul 2019) by Sam Illingworth (Executive editor)

AR by Maud Devès on behalf of the Authors (16 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Exploring a corpus of 320 888 news articles published by 32 worldwide newspapers in 2015, this paper shows the following: news covers a very small proportion of the total number of earthquakes occurring in a year; the duration of coverage is very short, which does not allow for proper coverage of long-term issues; and there is a typical framing of the news about earthquakes that introduces major biases in representation, impeding proper appropriation of the seismic risk by the public.