How Loud Rumbles Hit Newsstands: A Data Analysis of Coverage and Spatial Bias in German News about Landslides Around the World
For researchers studying media attention to disasters, this provides empirical evidence of geographic bias in German news coverage of landslides.
This paper analyzes 60,000 German news articles about 5,500 landslide events over 25 years, revealing spatial biases such as overreporting of Southern and Western Europe compared to actual landslide susceptibility.
Landslides often hit newsstands due to their destructive and potentially fatal effects. News are a valuable source of information for creating or enriching disaster databases and for expediting media-based studies of the dynamics of media attention. To accomplish that, news datasets must be filtered, geolocated and validated. This paper focuses on how landslides around the world are reported in German newspapers. We analyse almost 60k news articles about 5.5k news events in a 25-year period, compare it with external measures of countries' susceptibility to landslides and provide insights, e.g.~the overreporting of Southern and Western Europe, to foment further studies on inequalities in media attention to international disasters.