Increase in crisis coverage, but not the number of crisis news events

The world appears to be plagued by crises.

“The financial crisis, the European debt crisis, the migration crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza… The world seems to be stumbling from one existential crisis to the next, barely recovering from one before the next one hits,” said Stefan Geiß, a professor from the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

However, are there really more crises now than before?

Has it always been this way, or is something new happening? And if there are more public crises today than in the past, what is causing them?

Geiß decided to investigate the matter together with two colleagues, PhD research fellow Conor A. Kelly from the same department and Christina Viehmann from GESIS in Cologne. Their results were recently published in the Journal of Communication.

Data from 1785 to the present day

“We investigated crisis coverage in The Times newspaper spanning 235 years, and found some interesting preliminary results.”

The researchers went all the way back to 1785 to analyze developments in coverage. The Times is a serious, rather conservative newspaper, and is certainly not known for sensationalism.

In order to analyze such vast volumes of information, significant computing power was absolutely essential.

“Our research harnesses the power of computerized text analysis, enabling us to look back in time and see how previous generations understood the crises they faced,” said Geiß.

The analysis focused on news articles in The Times. To check the validity of their analysis, they compared the results with data from The Guardian, The Economist, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and The Washington Evening Star.

Identified more than 1000 crisis events

“We identified more than 1000 different crisis events that led to major news waves from 20 different types of crises. The most frequent were government crises, geopolitical crises, economic crises, epidemics and disasters,” said Geiß.

So, the fact that the media talk about crises is nothing new, and major news waves tend to occur on average around four times a year. However, while crises in the past were more spread out over time, they now tend to occur in clusters.

“We found that crisis events have become somewhat more frequent, but they tend to occur in more ‘clustered’ or ‘pulsating’ patterns rather than being evenly spread out over time,” said Geiß.

However, there is not necessarily a clear connection between the crises themselves and the crisis coverage.

“The increase in the use of crisis rhetoric is much stronger than the increase in the frequency of crises,” explained the professor.

In other words, crisis rhetoric is used much more frequently than before, but not all of it leads to noticeable news waves. Crisis rhetoric in individual articles does not necessarily create a sense of a public crisis or trigger a wave of news coverage regarding the situation everyone is concerned about.

There is, however, a period that appears quite atypical, as the two largest clusters of crisis waves ever recorded fall within this timeframe: the present.

“News coverage involving crisis rhetoric and the number of crisis events has been much greater in the last two decades than it was previously. The increase in crisis coverage is not just a British phenomenon either; it appears to be a trend in Western countries across various types of media.”

So why is this the case?

Several reasons for the increase in crisis coverage

According to the researchers, crisis rhetoric and to some extent what is portrayed as crisis events appear to be a response to three main factors:

1. Intensified crisis PR.

Interest groups pressure the media into perceiving something as a crisis. There are more of these groups, and they have become more professional. They also cover more different causes and sectors of society. It has therefore become easier for the media to experience, perceive and portray as a crisis events that would probably have been ignored or regarded as less serious in the past.

If something is perceived as a crisis, it increases the possibility that people with power and authority will allocate more money to the area; and the more power news media outlets get, the more relevant this becomes.

2. More diverse public spending across multiple sectors.

This is a complicated point. It concerns how public authorities are much more involved in more aspects of society than before, and how more of us are more concerned with what is happening around us.

For example, a larger proportion of the population is educated, and almost everyone has the right to vote. We therefore perceive it as more important to stay informed about what is happening in our local communities and around the world.

As more people wanted to know how their tax money was being spent and who to vote for, there was a greater interest in news coverage of politics. Mass media quickly gained a larger audience until the market became fully saturated in the 1950s. (See a detailed explanation of the contributing factors in the fact box.)

For politicians, being visible to a wider audience in the media has also become more important.

3. Increasing independence for news media outlets in relation to political parties.

In the past, media outlets were often tied to political parties and therefore not as dependent on making a profit.

An independent press has more power than before, but as competition increases and media outlets must generate a larger share of their revenue themselves, it may also be tempting to use crisis coverage to attract attention and income.

“These three factors are just the tip of the iceberg. The interplay among financial, political and communicative factors is extremely complex,” said Geiß.

However, it seems that the crisis events are less closely connected to crisis coverage than they were in the past. It is not necessarily the case that every event that receives crisis coverage is actually a crisis, and crisis rhetoric is not always effective. Most people do not always perceive events as a crisis, even if the media portrays them as such.

The internet, along with the fact that major media outlets now face both national and international competition to a much greater extent than before, may also be contributing to an increase in crisis coverage, although it is too early to say for sure.

Diverting attention away from other issues

Is it really that dangerous if the media exaggerate a bit from time to time?

“Crisis coverage keeps the public engaged while pushing many other pressing issues to the sidelines,” said Geiß.

The apparent crises divert attention away from issues that are not necessarily as newsworthy, but which may be equally important.

These pertain to worrying developments in society, such as the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor in many countries, or major humanitarian crises that have gradually developed over time.

Reference: Geiß S, Viehmann C, Kelly CA (2024). Inflation of crisis coverage? Tracking and explaining the changes in crisis labeling and crisis news wave salience 1785–2020. Journal of Communication, 2024, jqae033. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae033

https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqae033/776040