The distance bias in natural disaster reporting – empirical evidence for the United States

Michael Berlemann () and Tobias Thomas

Applied Economics Letters, 2019, vol. 26, issue 12, 1026-1032

Abstract: Whenever governments or international organizations provide aid in the aftermath of natural disasters, they typically justify this support by humanitarian motives. Previous empirical research found that media reports on natural disasters have a systematic impact on the amount of provided disaster aid. While this is unproblematic as long as media reports are unbiased and thus deliver an undistorted picture of the occurrence and severity of worldwide occurring disasters, systematic reporting biases would lead to distorted aid flows and perhaps other distortions like an insufficient perception of a region in international organizations. Based on data on three US news shows we show that disaster reporting is subject to a distance bias, e.g., the likelihood that a disaster is covered by the media depends on the distance between the country where the media are located and the country where the disasters occur. We also find evidence that besides the distance bias the state of economic development of a country and importance as export markets have a positive effect on the probability that US news shows are reporting on a natural disaster. As a result, international aid flows might be systematically biased and not distributed in line with the needs of the victims.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2018.1528332 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apeclt:v:26:y:2019:i:12:p:1026-1032

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2018.1528332

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().