Media reporting of natural disasters and its impact on disaster relief

媒体报道自然灾害及其对救灾的影响

• 批准号: 417014946
• 负责人: Dr. Maja Adena
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Forschungsschwerpunkt Markt und Entscheidung
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/417014946?language=en
• 关键词: Media; reporting; natural; disasters; its

Natural disasters result in immense costs for a society in terms of the loss of individual lives, physical and mental injuries, emergency measures, and the reconstruction of physical capital. Since no market mechanism works well enough to cover those costs and the governments of the countries hit by disaster are often overwhelmed by costs and challenges, international solidarity is often requested by affected countries. Media reporting of disasters is biased towards certain disasters and countries (Strömberg 2007). Given that information and framing affect individual decisions (see, among others, Andreoni 1995; Tversky and Kahneman 1981), the media likely affects the willingness of governments and publics to provide relief (Eisensee and Strömberg 2007).The project aims at (1) identifying media bias in coverage of natural disasters. Our measure of media bias will include articles counts, their length or timing of reports, as well as the content of the articles; (2) understanding the behavioral responses to this content (measures) both by the governments and by the public who choose whether and to what extent to support people and regions affected by disasters; (3) providing an estimate of the level of misallocation of funds resulting from media bias and potentially amplified by individual/governmental responses to this bias. The results of this project should help us to learn how to overcome related biases and gain more objectivity in choices not only in this specific domain but in much broader contexts including politics and other economic choices.

自然灾害在个人生命损失、身体和精神伤害、紧急措施和物质资本重建方面给社会造成巨大代价。由于任何市场机制都不足以支付这些费用，而且受灾国政府往往被费用和挑战压得喘不过气来，受灾国往往要求国际社会给予声援。媒体对灾害的报道偏向于某些灾害和国家（Strömberg 2007）。鉴于信息和框架会影响个人决策（参见Andreoni 1995; Tversky and Kahneman 1981），媒体可能会影响政府和公众提供救济的意愿（Eisensee and Strömberg 2007）。该项目旨在（1）识别媒体在自然灾害报道中的偏见。我们对媒体偏见的衡量将包括文章数量、报道的长度或时间以及文章的内容;（2）了解对此内容的行为反应（措施）由政府和公众决定是否以及在何种程度上支持受灾人民和地区;（3）估计因媒体偏见造成的资金分配不当的程度，并可能因个人/政府对这种偏见的反应而扩大。这个项目的结果应该帮助我们学习如何克服相关的偏见，不仅在这个特定的领域，而且在更广泛的背景下，包括政治和其他经济选择，获得更多的客观选择。