Bad Tidings

Communication and Catastrophe

Lynne Masel-Walters, Lee Wilkins, Tim Walters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135445133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First Published in 1993. In the 1970s, a book collecting research about the mass media and their role in disasters would have been unimaginable. This book, then, is an attempt to compile a somewhat eclectic view of research on mass communication and catastrophe. The editors have attempted to provide a sampling of the most recent empirical work on the mass media and disasters, including everything from content analysis of media reports to studies of audience response to those events.

1
The Social Science Study of Disasters and Mass Communication

E. L. Quarantelli
University of Delaware

There are five general topics in this chapter. First, there is a brief history of the early social and behavioral science disaster studies both in the United States and elsewhere. One major point is, although the work has come far in the last 35 years, the initial research was rather uneven and many areas remained little examined or almost unexplored, including the operations of the mass communication system in disasters. A few reasons for this selective inattention are suggested.

Second, there is a highlight and summary of some of the more important general themes that have emerged from the numerous studies on all kinds of disaster phenomena. Much of that research has uncovered a great number of myths about individual and organizational behavior at the emergency time period of disasters. Of note is the existence of a disaster mythology that has been partly attributed to what is assumed and reported about such situations by mass media organizations.

Third, a substantive listing of the specific studies undertaken indicates something of the quantity and topical focus of the past and current work on mass communications in disasters. Research on the subject matter has accelerated as have the efforts at theoretical formulations.

The fourth section of the chapter focuses on major themes in the research findings and observations up to this time about mass communication behavior in disasters. In the process, some attention is given to important unknown matters as well as to known themes. A graphic matrix is used to try to depict the present state of knowledge.

Finally, the chapter concludes with a partial agenda for future research on mass communication activities in disasters. Certain innovations in the mass media area, particularly the development of new electronic technology, as well as qualitative changes in the nature of disastrous events, are creating different sets of research questions and issues. What has been learned from the past may not be equally as applicable to the disaster situations of the future.

The chapter's prime interest is in the human, social, group, and organization aspects of mass communication mediated through mass media at times of disasters. More specifically, the major focus is on emergency time-period activities (that is, on preparedness and response). However, such an emphasis does reflect the bulk of the existing literature, because there are very few mass communication studies related to the mitigation and recovery phases of disasters. Similarly, there are only passing allusions to the isolated pieces of research on fictional depictions of disasters (but this topic is partly covered in chapter 9 by Shain, this volume; see also Quarantelli, 1985c).

This overview mostly discusses mass communication in actual or threatened natural and technological disasters. Thus, collective stress or mass emergency situations such as wartime activities, civil disturbances, and riots, terrorist attacks, and other conflict events are outside its scope. Although there are some similarities, there are also some basic differences between mass communication in consensus type (that is, natural and technological disasters) and conflict type (e.g., wars) situations (cf. Kueneman & Wright, 1976; Quarantelli, 1970). However, future research should give high priority to systematic studies of the similarities and differences of mass communication in these two kinds of "collective stress situations" as Barton (1970) called them.

Given a choice, for scholarly purposes it is preferable to distinguish the concept of mass communication from that of mass media, with the former having references to the social processes and groups involved and the latter to the technologies or mechanical means involved. Such an approach would allow an analysis of two related, but, nonetheless, independent phenomena, that is, the technological base and the organizational superstructure. However, rather than attempting to make a case in this chapter for the theoretical and practical usefulness of this distinction, the two terms—mass media and mass communication—are used interchangeably, as unfortunately, is the tradition in the literature of the area. Included under either one of the terms is the full range of what is usually intended, that is, newspapers and other print outlets, radio and television stations, wire services, cable systems, and the more recently developed, so-called high-tech electronic services (for the last, see Rice et al., 1984).

The Development of Research

The first systematic social science disaster study ever undertaken was by S. Prince (1920), who, as a part of his PhD dissertation in sociology looked at the social change consequences of an ammunition ship explosion in Halifax, Canada, which killed about 2,000 in 1917. Although an occasional study was done in the years that followed, social and behavioral research of disastrous events did not have any continuity until the end of World War II. Then a body of data began to be produced, especially on the behavior in the emergency time periods of disasters. Particularly important in these early days was the research done at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago (1950-1954), studies by the Committee on Disaster Studies and the Disaster Research Group (DRG) at the National Academy of Sciences (1951-1962), and work by the Disaster Research Center (DRC), established at the Ohio State University in 1963 and relocated to the University of Delaware in 1985. These pioneering efforts, linked together by key NORC personnel who played major roles at DRG and DRC, created, systematized, and institutionalized the field of disaster studies in the United States (see Quarantelli, 1986).

Although most researchers were sociologists, each of the three groups made its own contribution. The NORC work was primarily social psychology in orientation and was concerned mostly with victim reaction to disaster impact. DRG research began to move toward a focus on group behavior in disasters. The DRC studies explicitly concentrated on the preparations and responses of social organizations and communities to quick onset disasters. All three studied both natural and technological disasters and assumed that the distinction was not especially useful for research purposes.

Without making any detailed examination, some of the earlier researchers did note the important role of radio, in particular, in transmitting warnings about potential disasters. Anderson (1970) reported on mass media involvement in the transmission of warnings to the general populace about tsunamies in Crescent City, California, and Hilo, Hawaii, after 1964 and 1965 earthquakes. DRC obtained information from several radio stations regarding their role in warnings about the 1965 Palm Sunday tornadoes in Northern Indiana (Brouillette, 1966). In describing warnings issued in the 1966 Topeka tornado, Stallings (1967) noted how stations passed on messages from the U.S. Weather Bureau.

This pattern of observing that radio and television stations have some part in warning about impending disasters has continued to the present day (e.g., see Ledingham & Masel-Walters, 1985). With some recent exceptions, the research focus is on the warning process rather than on the operation of mass communication. From a theoretical viewpoint, the mass communication system, as such, was more generally ignored, even when the processes of communications in disasters generally was a central focus, as in the doctoral dissertation of Harry Williams (1956).

The pioneering studies paid almost no attention to mass media organizations, as such, or to nonwarning mass communication news or stories at times of disasters. Although it was a research organization attuned to mass media operations, NORC all but totally ignored the area of mass communication (although Bucher peripherally treated the topic in her 1957 independent work on scapegoating). The DRG, either in its own field studies or in research it supported, was almost as disinterested, except for noting the use of radio in warning messages. About the only exception was a 1964 DRC in-depth study of the changes in structure and functioning of a radio station during a major forest fire near Santa Barbara, California. Made public in 1974, the report of this study (written by Adams) is, according to i Inventory of Disaster Field Studies in the Social and Behavioral Sciences 1919-1979 (Quarantelli, 1984), the first clear-cut piece of research on a mass media organization. The only earlier piece directly focused on some mass communications aspects was in a 1956 Master's thesis by Ewell R. Williams who did a content analysis of letters to the editor published in a newspaper after the 1953 Waco, Texas, tornado. Harry Moore (1958) incorporated the Williams material and presented a more extensive content analysis of that same newspaper's treatment of disaster-related news stories, photographs, and advertisements. For all practical purposes, these three studies constituted the corpus of direct work on mass communication in disasters until the late 1960s.

Few other institutional areas were given so little direct attention. Just a few years ago, in singling out the mass media of communication area, Verta Taylor (1978) said that, "At present, the very few studies which exist in the literature are confined almost exclusively to descriptions and analyses of the news reporting of local radio and televisions in the United States. Much more needs to be done" (p. 274).

To some extent, this omission was the product of 1960s social science research that did little on mass communications, except for certain kinds of market and survey studies. McQuail (1969) described the body of early work in this area as bearing

the marks of an entirely practical concern with two objectives: the counting and description of audiences and the measurement of direct effects on those exposed to communication. Between them, these two enterprises account for most of the research effort over a period of twenty or thirty years covering the 1930's, 1940's and much of the 1950's. (p. 36)

So the early social science disaster researchers had little to guide them in designing studies of the operation of mass communications systems in disasters. There were other factors involved. One was that the methodology required for similar kinds of quantitative "audience" research would have been extremely difficult to implement in the disaster field. Given enough resources it was not impossible. Witness the NORC classic, and still unmatched, in-depth survey of victims in an Arkansas tornado (see Marks, 1954).

More importantly, the early researchers failed to recognize the dual role of mass communicators in disasters: first, as reporters of events and second, as major organizational actors in preparing for, and responding to, disasters. There was a strong tendency to see the mass media outlets as primarily reporting about events and as poor reporters of disaster happenings. These pioneers found considerable mythology about the supposed behavior of individuals and groups in disaster situations. Lewis Killian (1986), one such pioneer said, "My early field experiences quickly led me to doubt the validity of most press accounts of disasters. They could not be depended upon."

Given a widespread skepticism about mass communication disaster accounts and a failure to appreciate fully mass media organizational operations in disasters, researchers tended to treat the mass media as at best a secondary, and none too reliable, source of information about a disaster event. Some early work even decided that press accounts of "panic" could safely be ignored as valid data (Quarantelli, 1954).

No doubt, the little governmental funding available to study the topic abetted the general neglect of the mass communication area. Perhaps there was a reluctance, as on some other research topics, to fund research that might be politically sensitive. More likely, funding agencies remained passive, given their view of mass communicators as reporters rather than as participants in disaster responses, a perception that remains widespread.

Outside of the United States, pioneering disaster research has been criticized as being somewhat parochial and reflective only of the American scene (e.g., Dombrowsky, 1981). Although social science disaster studies were initiated in Canada in the mid 1950s and in Japan and France in the early 1960s, the status of research on mass communication was not that different elsewhere. Eventually the operations of mass communications in disasters became a central focus of attention in Japan, but disaster researchers outside the United States also generally neglected the topic in the early years of study.

General Observations and Findings

Since the 1960s, disaster research has increased tremendously, with probably more studies being undertaken in a single year of the 1980s than were conducted in the first 10 years of pioneering work combined. There is no question that the later research is not only quantitatively, but qualitatively far superior to the early studies. This acceleration can be seen by contrasting the first research codification effort that was made by NORC (see Fritz & Marks, 1954), and the massive inventory of just sociological findings recently produced by Drabek (1986). The former, a 15-page article, stands in marked contrast to the latter, a 509-page book that draws 1,232 empirically supported conclusions on 146 subtopics derived from nearly 1,000 published reports.

Although these and all other literature reviews and codifications say little about the topic of mass communications in disasters, some major themes in the research findings and observations do emerge. These bear indirectly on a suggested relationship between what mass media outlets and communicators report about individual and group emergency-time behavior and what social science researchers have found out about such behavior. Even keeping in mind the different objectives of workers in the two areas, as Weller (1979) has pointed out, the differences are marked.

One theme in the research literature is that human beings respond remarkably well to extreme stress. Those threatened by disasters do not break into panic flight. Likewise, they seldom engage in antisocial or criminal behavior such as looting. Similarly, on the whole victims neither go "crazy" or psychologically break down, nor do they manifest severe mental health problems as a result of disasters. Those officials and others with community responsibilities do not abandon their work roles to favor their family roles. In the aftermath of a disaster impact, survivors do not passively wait for outside assistance, but actively initiate the first search-and-rescue efforts, taking the injured to medical care and doing whatever can be done in the crisis. Mass shelters are avoided. Those forced out of their homes go overwhelmingly to places offered by relatives and friends.

Although other characteristic behavior in disasters could be cited, a central theme in the research literature (see Barton, 1970; Drabek, 198...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 THE SOCIAL SCIENCE STUDY OF DISASTERS AND MASS COMMUNICATION
• 2 BHOPAL: THE POLITICS OF MEDIATED RISK
• 3 THE SOUND AND THE FURY: MASS MEDIA AND HURRICANES
• 4 COMMUNICATING THREAT INFORMATION FOR VOLCANO HAZARDS
• 5 TMI: THE MEDIA STORY THAT WILL NOT DIE
• 6 PREVENTIVE JOURNALISM AND AIDS EDITORIALS: DILEMMAS FOR PRIVATE AND PUBLIC HEALTH
• 7 THE HOSTAGE TAKER, THE TERRORIST, THE MEDIA: PARTNERS IN PUBLIC CRIME
• 8 REPORTING CHERNOBYL: CUTTING THE GOVERNMENT FOG TO COVER THE NUCLEAR CLOUD
• 9 IT'S THE NUCLEAR, NOT THE POWER AND IT'S IN THE CULTURE, NOT JUST THE NEWS
• 10 TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF DISASTER COVERAGE
• 11 CONCLUSION: ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX