The horrific attacks of September 11th, 2001, caught the natural hazards and technological risks communities as completely off-balance as they apparently did the intelligence and military communities. Soon after these terrible events, the Natural Hazards Center at Boulder issued a call to the hazards communities to marshal what they knew of extreme events and make it available to those responsible for responding to this new kind of hazard, crime, and war. My normal area of research lies in the analysis of various media as they report natural disasters and hazardous situations and affect public perception and agency response. Unlike a disaster of natural origins or of technological accident, however, this event was equally a crime and an act of war. I agreed to do an analysis of one newspaper's coverage of these incidents and their aftermath for the first twelve weeks following the disaster.

I utilized the online edition of the Los Angeles Times, the nationally- prominent newspaper that dominates the region in which I live. I decided to use the online edition, because that is how I normally access the paper and because it made data collection a lot easier. I categorized the main concerns of each article originating on the front screen of the on-line paper, and then followed trends in coverage through the twelve weeks of the project.

I coded 558 such articles, and ten main themes and seven minor themes emerged, which included categories common in coverage of other disasters and a few unique to this disaster (Figure 1). There was also a category for unrelated stories. Three categories garnered the most overall front page attention from the L.A. Times during the first twelve weeks: Military, Investigation, and Reactions, categories one would expect of a war, a crime, and a disaster, respectively. The L.A. Times' attention shifts through time, however, as one would expect.

Far and away the dominant concern through the first twelve weeks viewed together was the military category with fully 103, or 18.5 percent of the 558 stories Pallid secondary themes were those of the crime investigation (n=57, or 10.2 percent) and of reactions to the disaster itself (n=55, or 9.9 percent).

The context of the events of 9/11 received the least front screen coverage, with just six stories, or 1.1 percent. The context is an important part of this story and key for Americans to understand and prepare for what is to them a new hazard. In this sense, the attacks of 9/11 generated similar needs for contextualized information as any disaster, and the weak showing of the context on the front screen here fits with prior work on how media perform in other hazards and disasters. Moreover, the context of this disaster was deeply and unavoidably political and ideological at core. Its disappointing treatment here is consistent with the ideological narrowing that some media critics worry comes with corporate concentration in media, but it is also consistent with the long-established media need for drama and simplicity, which contextual information rarely satisfies.

Also receiving very little coverage was reconstruction (n=9, or 1.6 percent). This is not too surprising due to the still early stage of this disaster on the conventional post-event timeline of response-restoration-reconstruction.

The tacit story of recovery is seen in the eventual appearance of large numbers of stories that were unrelated to the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. By the end of the twelve week study period, fully 179 or 32.1 percent of the front screen stories in the L.A. Times fell in the unrelated category.

Collapsed into the three metastories of disaster, crime, and war, the dominant narrative was the war story, with 168 of the 558 stories, or 30.1 percent (Figure 2). The disaster story was the second most prominent metastory for the twelve week study period, almost a co-dominant at 152 stories or 27.2 percent. The crime story was the least covered of the grand narratives, with 59 stories or 10.6 percent.

Looking at these more critically, one finds that the disaster story lingering daily in the lives of New Yorkers and Washingtonians has become more of a war story. The military-related coverage takes up 30 percent of the first twelve weeks of overall coverage. Disaster-related stories did dominate for the first three weeks of coverage, but they gave way to the war story for most of the last nine weeks. I worry about whether this emphasis on war coverage may deprioritize the needs of New Yorkers and Washingtonians in recovering from these horrible events.

For people involved in clearing the rubble, restoring the full functionality of New York, deciding what to do with the World Trade Center site, and trying to mitigate the risk of any similar event, their disaster stories are being gradually submerged in the stories of war. While the war takes more and more media attention away from their needs, their needs are not just gradually and proportionally fading away at this point. They have to work to get the media to focus on their needs.

Based on my work with other hazards and disasters, I would recommend the following:

First, non-governmental and victim advocacy organizations are in a position to play to the media's need for human drama by generating "newsworthy" events, including demonstrations.

Second, government agencies and NGOs can actively cultivate personal relationships between particular reporters and particular representatives of their organizations. A great example of this is the relationship of national media with seismologists Kate Hutton and Lucy Jones of Caltech and the USGS, respectively. Many journalists want to do a good job and do appreciate getting to know the experts.

Third, the Internet can be used to generate public interest and support. Other work of mine has shown the stunning efficacy of Internet organizing in public risk debates. While the web is all the rage, it is the homely channels of the Internet -- e-mail, listservers, and news groups -- that offer the possibility of exponential expansion of a message to reach an audience of a size and geographical scope once the domain exclusively of national media conglomerates.

Maintained by Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue
First placed on the web: 03/21/02
Last revised: 03/21/02