Reporting the drought: a study of news cycles

Abstract

Droughts are newsworthy because of their impacts on regional and national economies and on farmers, a group with an almost iconic status in Australian society. On the other hand, a drought can be long, and from a news gathering point of view, uninteresting. This is a study of the way in which media coverage of drought waxes and wanes, with the primary purpose being to see whether or not the intensity of the news coverage varies with the intensity of the drought. The second purpose is to see if a regional news organisation is more interested in a drought and more attuned to the severity of that drought than is the case with a metropolitan news organisation. The main data set comprises the monthly totals of the number of drought-related news stories in two daily newspapers, one metropolitan (Brisbane) and one regional (Toowoomba), from early 1990 to late 1996, a period of below-average rainfall in southern Queensland. Statistical regression tests revealed correlations between some of the variables. Against initial expectations, the metropolitan newspaper coverage ran almost as many drought-related stories as its regional counterpart and the intensity of the coverage was significantly correlated with a ‘drought intensity index’, whereas this was not so for the regional paper. It was also noted that there were some differences in the types of drought stories that each paper ran and in their apparent responsiveness to the severity of the drought.