Wright, K., Madrid-Morales, D. orcid.org/0000-0002-1522-5857 and Barrie, C. (2025) Beyond “emergencies?" reporting on humanitarian issues around the world. Digital Journalism. ISSN 2167-0811
Abstract
How do journalists around the world report on humanitarian issues? Two decades after Calhoun first wrote about the “emergency imaginary”, it is still seen as a “master frame”, dominating narratives about humanitarian action in news and aid work alike. But no one has previously tested the extent to which the emergency imaginary dominates journalism about humanitarian issues within a largescale, systematic study. Using an innovative combination of manual and computational approaches, we analyse a global corpus of over a million media texts, disseminated between 2010–2020. This specially constructed dataset included 582 sources of broadcast, print and online media in 92 countries. We found that the emergency imaginary did dominate reporting in most Anglophone countries. But it did not seem to dominate the coverage of humanitarian issues world-wide. Instead, journalism elsewhere tended to use hybrid interpretative frames: blending aspects of the emergency imaginary with other kinds of discourse. However, in most of the countries we analysed, online journalism had a closer relationship to the emergency imaginary than non-digital content. Based on an analysis of document similarity, we suggest that this may be influenced by their dependence on copy from three wire agencies, Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Thomson Reuters.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | Humanitarian; emergencies; global; corpus analysis; a la carte word embedding: principal component analysis |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Journalism Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 19 May 2025 16:06 |
Last Modified: | 19 May 2025 16:06 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor and Francis Group |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/21670811.2025.2502129 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:226855 |
Download
Filename: Beyond Emergencies Reporting on Humanitarian Issues Around the World.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0