Vultee: Frames of Mitigation
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
August 2009, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 103–126.
News Frames of Mitigation and
Responsibility After Hurricane Katrina
Fred Vultee
Department of Communication
Wayne State University
Email: [email protected]
A content analysis of national news coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s impact and
aftermath examines how responsibility is apportioned between local and national actors,
when stories are told from personal or institutional perspectives, and how the important
topic of disaster mitigation is covered relative to disaster impact and recovery. Results
of this case study suggest the importance of storytelling frames to perceptions of disasters
and governmental performance.
Keywords: Agenda-setting, framing, mitigation, Hurricane Katrina, attribution
Introduction
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2005, President George W. Bush marked the anniversary
of the 2001 terrorist attacks with a moment of silence, then prepared to return to the
clamor of the moment: his third trip to New Orleans and the storm of recrimination that
followed a devastating hurricane. The coincidence was more than merely temporal: A
large part of the criticism was directed at the post-9/11 agency that has come to
encompass all federal disaster-response functions. Indeed, the phenomena of terrorism
and disaster, for all their differences, are often discussed in the same context: “The
terrorists won’t wait,” a USA Today editorial quoted the federal panel that reviewed the
2001 terrorist attacks as saying. It added: “Neither will natural disasters” (USA Today
2005).
Whether and how the public has to wait is a different question. The coverage of
disasters’ impact remains a staple of daily journalism. But as research suggests, the
elements of a natural disaster with the greatest long-term significance might be the ones
that receive the least emphasis in news coverage. This project examines news coverage of
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath along with data from public opinion polls to
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determine what aspects of a disaster receive the most coverage and what elements are
then placed on the agenda of public interest that, in media agenda-setting theory, is
influenced by the prominence of elements in the media’s own agenda. The study
emphasizes two issues of particular relevance. First, mitigation, defined by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency as “any sustained action taken to reduce or eliminate
long-term risk to life and property from a hazard event.” Mitigation deals less with
helping victims of a disaster than with measures that have been taken, are being taken, or
should be taken to reduce the likelihood of a specific kind of hazard or lessen or
redistribute its impact on people or property. (See coding instructions in Appendix 1 for a
more detailed explanation of how mitigation is conceptualized here.) Second, attribution,
or the degree to which blame, credit, and responsibility are apportioned among various
actors.
Measures taken or not taken before and after a disaster to lessen its impact are central
to determining how both risks and resources are allocated, yet they risk being
overshadowed by the hard-news aspects of disaster. The spotlight of news coverage
either remains fixed on the sensation of the moment or moves along with the apparent
return of order. Issues of this nature have been addressed for more than three decades
under traditional media agenda-setting theory, which “involves both the surveillance and
consensus functions of communication, calling attention to the new and major issues of
the day and influencing agreement about what are the priorities of those issues”
(McCombs 2005, pp. 555-556).
Related concerns grow out of the study of media framing, conceptualized here as a
selective focus on particular elements of a news story to help both audiences and news
workers figure out what “kind” of story it is and how it should be understood and
categorized (e.g. Entman 1993, 2004). Of particular interest is how responsibility is
apportioned among a story’s actors—indeed, Iyengar finds that “the primary
consideration that governs any issue opinion is the assignment of responsibility for the
issue in question” (1989, p. 879). Such a concept raises a number of questions about how
disasters are portrayed in the media. Does the personalization of national news into the
president as a sort of national protagonist (Cook 1997; Iyengar and Kinder 1987) lead
audiences to apportion credit and blame inappropriately among the actors involved?
Similarly, does the use of frames that emphasize “personalized case histories” (Iyengar
and Kinder 1987, p. 36), known as episodic or vivid frames, affect the attribution of
responsibility differently from the thematic frames that emphasize structural issues,
trends, and other abstract matters? If vulnerability is bounded by class rather than by
adverse reactions in some unnamed system (Cutter 1993), the victim frame in Hurricane
Katrina has a ring of social justice to it as well. But if attention to individual plights
draws news resources away from attention to potential systemic flaws, such justice would
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be limited in its scope. This study concentrates on the frames that are chosen to organize
news stories in terms of what they are about, who is affected by the events they describe,
and who is responsible for those events’ positive or negative outcomes. Those are
elements that, in agenda-setting theory, show news audiences what to think about.
Agenda-setting and Framing
Though the original idea has been both narrowed and expanded, media agenda setting
remains a well-established and parsimonious way of explaining how items that are made
salient in news accounts come to be seen as salient by the public. A traditional agendasetting effect—the relationship between prominence on the media agenda and on the
public agenda—is fundamental for exploring the issue of disaster mitigation in public
understanding. Of equal value, though, is the expansion of agenda setting to a second
level, the salience of attributes as well as of items (e.g., Ghanem 1997; Kiousis 2004;
McCombs 2005), which is the part of the agenda-setting process most often likened to
framing.
This project tests the basic media agenda-setting correlation, but it also addresses
second-level issues (the ways in which an agenda item is framed) and the ways in which
news media select and prioritize items and their attributes—generally, how the media
create the “common set of salient issues” (Dalton et al. 1988, p. 465) they bring to a
meeting of the political elite and the public. The topic of hazard mitigation, in this
understanding, has formed at several different stages in recent decades on the policy
agenda but is always at risk of being swamped by a wave of other stories arising from the
onset of an actual event. Thus, it is worth asking how effectively this concept reached the
public agenda during the critical time of debate around the Gulf of Mexico storms of
August and September 2005. At the same time, though, a robust competition emerged at
the second level of agenda setting: what parts of the system had failed and which level of
government was responsible? Conceptually, an agenda of attributes can affect either the
understanding of attributes (agenda setting at its second level) or the salience of the
objects they belong to (Ghanem 1997). As Kiousis (2005) suggests, such an agenda
should also be able to have both effects at the same time.
Agenda setting has its roots in political communication. But as the theory—and,
inevitably, the media environment—have expanded, so have its boundaries; it has even
been used to examine the effect of televised fiction on the public agenda (Kim, ShoarGhaffari, and Gustainis 1990; Holbrook and Hill 2005). Thus it has been useful for
looking at what is not said—what agendas are not set with the public—as well as what is
said. This is a matter of particular concern in the study of disasters because the ways in
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which agendas are controlled—particularly when it comes to blame and responsibility—
is central to understanding the political aspect of disasters (Olson 2000).
The apparent effects of framing and agenda-setting can run counter to the apparent
intent of those who gather and produce the news. Iyengar and Kinder found that episodic
frames—describing, say, a policy issue like unemployment from the perspective of one
unemployed person—might, if anything, “diminish the power of television news to set
the public’s agenda” (1987, p. 41). Iyengar (1989) also found that regarding a particular
national issue, poverty, such individual frames were associated with public perceptions of
individual responsibility, whereas thematic frames that located poverty as a social matter
were associated with a sense of social responsibility. Of particular interest in examining
the coverage of an event like Hurricane Katrina, in which concerns about race and class
were frequently raised, is Iyengar and Kinder’s further suggestion that personalized
presentations of news events “may fail most completely when they depict victims that
differ in obvious ways from viewers” (1987, p. 41).
Although media agenda-setting is related to the concept of agenda-setting as
understood in political science, the two are often distinct in focus. Media agenda-setting
is, at bottom, the influence of media salience—how prominent an event or issue is in the
news—on the salience of the issue in public opinion. Its origins are distinctly political;
agenda-setting is often studied during election campaigns, and the public agenda it
identifies is often indistinguishable from the lists of most important issues reported in
campaign-season news accounts. Media agenda-setting does not necessarily look directly
at the process Kingdon (1995) identifies: How an idea becomes an “idea whose time has
come” among political decision-makers and their aides, allies, or opponents.
From the policymaker’s perspective, the largest palette is the “systemic” agenda,
containing “any idea that could possibly be considered by participants in the policy
process” (Birkland 2004, p. 180). This is also called a “public agenda” (Cobb & Ross,
1997), though in media studies the “public agenda” usually refers to public opinion rather
than this broader set of actors in the political process. Those participants include, at least
implicitly, the media, which are essential for an issue to acquire public recognition (Cobb
and Elder 1972). From there, issues can move into an institutional or formal agenda for
actual consideration by official bodies. Media agenda-setting plays a role in that process,
both by the matters it highlights and by the ones it leaves in the dark (Wanta 1997). From
the perspective of framing, “the media’s most important role may be in spreading out the
field of thinkable solutions to public problems rather than making any particular position
dominant in policy decision making” (Sotirovic 2000, p. 269). An important question for
this project, then, is whether hazard mitigation is incorporated into that field of solutions
before, during, or after a natural or technological disaster.
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Hazard mitigation has been increasingly discussed in the study of hazards and
disasters as the financial cost of those events in the United States has spiraled in recent
decades. Mitigation was an important element of the United Nations’ Decade of Natural
Disaster Reduction, 1990-1999, and has been a prominent feature of several pieces of
federal legislation in recent decades. Using content analysis and public opinion surveys,
this study will explore whether media or public agendas for mitigation have been created.
The Media and Hazards
News media, as Singer and Endreny (1993, p. 22) note, “are reactive. With rare
exceptions, they do not call the public’s attention to a hazard until an ‘accident’ has
occurred”—an observation rooted in coverage of both natural and technological disasters
and in government response to crises as well. Hazard coverage is also biased, they
contend, toward the dramatic rather than the slow-moving, the new rather than the wellestablished, in a pattern that generally reflects established news values (p. 61). So-called
“slow-onset” hazards in particular “need to ‘find’ an event” (Wilkins and Patterson 1991,
p. 19) in order to be covered. But such events can be the very ones that, with the benefit
of hindsight, merit coverage on news value alone: Financial losses from the drought of
1988-89 exceeded those caused by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and heat waves are among
the few weather extremes from which deaths have increased across recent decades—
1,100 deaths in a heat wave in 1995, for example (Changnon et al. 2000, p. 437).
Accordingly, researchers have asked why mitigation of hazards and disasters has not
achieved greater prominence. In his 25-year update of the groundbreaking 1975
Assessment of Research on Natural Hazards, Mileti (1999, p. 2) noted that “troubling
questions remain about why more progress has not been made.” He pointed to a
“traditional planning model” of hazard management: “Study the problem, implement one
solution, and move on to the next problem.”
Such an idea of hazards as static and mitigation as linear is perilous: “Events during
the past quarter-century have shown that natural disasters and the technological hazards
that may accompany them are not problems that can be solved in isolation” (Mileti 1999,
p. 2). He and his colleagues call for a policy of sustainable hazard mitigation—attention
to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, quality of life, local resiliency and
responsibility, the strength of the local economy, equity with and among generations, and
consensus (pp. 5-6). Though deaths from natural hazards as a whole declined between
1975 and 1995, the financial costs rose steadily. Many such losses, rather than being the
result of whims of nature, are “the predictable results of interactions among three major
systems” (1999, p. 3): the natural environment, the characteristics of the communities
that live there, and the “constructed environment”: buildings, roads, bridges and the like.
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As Cutter (1993, p. 177) points out, “risks and hazards often become so politicized
that it constrains their management. The identification, assessment and measurement of
risks and hazards, and the selection of mitigation techniques, [are] often played out in the
court of public opinion.” But public understanding at least, if not public opinion, is
essential at any level—whether in the long-horizon model Mileti emphasizes or in the 12hour window an evacuation order might require. That raises questions about media
performance not only in the immediate crisis of a natural or technological disaster but in
the periods between crises, in which mitigation needs to be discussed.
If mitigation has not reached a higher place on the public agenda, one reason could be
the media: “The images which most people have of disasters appear to have been shaped
largely by the news media and motion picture films” (Mileti et al. 1975, p. 1)—an
intuitive observation buttressed in recent years as scholars have continued to look at the
social (Keane 2001) and political (Ryan and Kellner 1988) functions of popular film.
Wilkins and Patterson (1990) drew parallels to the general workings of news routines:
Meditated risk communication, whether news or fiction,
is largely unidirectional, is generally event-centered, focuses on authorities
currently in power, and is dramatic and vivid rather than analytic. It is
focused on the short term, containing little information about individual or
societal tradeoffs between a variety of costs and benefits.” (1990, p. 22)
Mediated risk communication in general, Wilkins and Patterson (1990) found, gives
little attention to how social or political processes affect risks, even if those elements are
among the hardest to address.
Other craft constraints also hamper journalism’s ability to convey a clear picture of
risk to the public. These include a lack of scientific knowledge and ability to identify
appropriate sources, an emphasis on drama rather than scientific merit, and biases toward
simplification and personalization (Smith 1996). The widely decried “game frame”
approach to elections—covering them as if they were a series of sports contests—appears
to be spilling into policy news in general (Lawrence 2000). The news norm of balance
and objectivity presents its own concerns: Whether presenting “both (or more than two)
divergent points of view” on an issue “is accurate reporting or not depends on whether
the different positions are really equally compelling, or whether the weight of evidence
clearly favors one side or the other” (Singer and Endreny 1993, p. 165). The normal
workings of news, then, are a powerful mechanism for ensuring not only that procedural
policy news is kept in the background but that when it does emerge, it will be told in a
familiar setting of winners and losers—or, as is clear from the coverage that followed
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Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, those less guilty and more guilty of failing to
sufficiently prepare for these storms.
Classifying the various stages through which a disaster develops has been the subject
of some debate. Mileti et al. (1975, p. 9) use a six-stage model, concluding with
reconstruction. Mileti (1999) offers a four-stage model, in which mitigation arises
somewhere after reconstruction. Sapat and Birkland (2004) divide government activities
into preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation (2004, p. 2). This project will divide
hazards into four stages: warning, impact, recovery, and mitigation. This typology
ignores preparedness, which takes place before news media coverage begins and
distinguishes between two distinct aspects of response—warning and impact.
Disaster research has frequently focused on the “immediate post-impact” period
(Mileti et al. 1975). “The most neglected time period is what we have called the
reconstruction period” (1975, p. 12), with the warning period also appearing to be undercovered given its importance. Much research since has looked at warnings (e.g. Mileti
1999; Cutter 1993; Sattler and Marshall 2002), but the stages that follow impact and
recovery remain largely unexplored. If the current study of hazards and disasters is one
in which “more is lost while more is known” (White et al. 2001, p. 81), an examination of
how—or whether—mitigation concepts are introduced is clearly in order.
Thus, this project addresses these research questions:
RQ1: Which disaster phases are used as organizing frames in the weeks during and
after the hurricane?
RQ2: How do personal and structural frames emerge over the course of a continuing
disaster story?
RQ3: Which level of government—state/local or federal—is the predominant actor
portrayed as disaster coverage unfolds?
RQ4: Are government actors at the state/local or federal levels portrayed as
handling their responsibilities positively or negatively as disaster coverage
unfolds?
It also tests two hypotheses based on agenda-setting and framing:
H1:
Approval of the president’s handling of a disaster will decline if media
coverage portrays the federal response unfavorably.
H2:
Articles told through a personal frame will be more likely to portray
government actions favorably than articles told through a structural frame.
Method
A content analysis of news coverage in the national daily newspaper USA Today
during the onset, impact and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in summer and fall 2005 was
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conducted to address those questions. Though the “prestige press” is often examined as a
surrogate for national coverage and plays an important role in setting a national news
agenda, the prestige papers themselves do not set an agenda for the proverbial “milkman
in Omaha” (Cohen 1963, p. 110). That function is best represented by a flavor of news
available in near-identical form across the country and designed to belong to no region.
USA Today’s national sameness is reflected in the derisive “News McNuggets” epithets
of its early days. Despite that scorn, the paper has grown in size (it surpassed The Wall
Street Journal as the nation’s largest-circulation daily in November 1999) and ambition: a
newspaper whose editorial stance toward the 2003 Iraq war is examined along with those
of the Journal, The Washington Post and the New York Times (Mooney 2004) can clearly
no longer be judged on the brevity of its stories alone. Such a paper is more likely than
others to be free of regional biases—such concerns as the perception that the local
member of the U.S. House is superior to the other 434 rascals, or the tendency of even
sophisticated metropolitan papers to local boosterism (e.g., Perloff 1998).
Agenda-setting is not what it was in the days when the agenda was set from three
television networks and a few newspapers. Indeed, some scholars foresee the end of
agenda-setting’s useful life in modern technology: News agendas are becoming too
scattered and too personal to yield the relevant data (McCombs 2005). Despite the
importance of online or interactive sources to the future of agenda-setting, McCombs
(2005) suggests two factors that underline the vitality of the traditional paradigm. First,
old media have not lost their hold on habitual users, nor have the new media yet
cemented themselves as tools of habit. Second, however large the diversity of sources
available online, interactive news links still point heavily to the online presence of
traditional media outlets. The “high degree of redundancy” (2005, p. 545) among news
media found in the original agenda-setting study, then, might have merely reinvented
itself in high-tech form for the new century. A sample from a single national outlet might
be narrow, then, but it is not necessarily unrepresentative.
Elements of the media agenda are determined from a content analysis of USA Today
articles beginning Aug. 29, 2005, the day Hurricane Katrina struck the Louisiana coast,
and continuing for four weeks. Four later one-week periods, two in October and two in
November, were also studied to see whether any changes were emerging. Only reports
and editorials in the main news section and the business section were coded. This
selection process yielded 338 articles.
Articles are coded on four dimensions—phase of disaster (warning, impact, recovery,
mitigation), use of personal frame (corresponding to Iyengar and Kinder’s episodic
frame) vs. structural frame (corresponding to Iyengar and Kinder’s thematic frame), the
presence of state or local governments or the federal governments as actors, and whether
those actors were portrayed favorably or unfavorably. The categories were refined after
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testing with a second coder on a set of articles drawn from outside the sample period (see
Appendix I for detailed definitions of the coding categories).
The bulk of the articles were then coded by the researcher, with 10 percent coded by
the second coder. Intercoder reliability, using Scott’s pi (Riffe, Lacy, and Fico 2005) to
account for agreement by chance, was .82 for personal vs. structural frames and .72 for
phase of disaster described in the article. Because reliability was low on an initial test of
portrayals of state/local or federal responsibility, new coding rules were written and 171
articles, covering the first two weeks of the study period and two later weeks, were
recoded. This scheme yielded an intercoder reliability of .86 when 19 of those articles (11
percent) were double-coded.
Survey results were obtained by searching the iPOLL Databank and other resources
provided by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut,
for questions that mentioned “hurricane” in surveys conducted in August through
November 2005. Other polls were found by searching the Lexis-Nexis database for
surveys mentioning “Bush” and “Katrina” in those months. Though there is clearly a risk
of pitfalls in comparing one poll with another, these surveys all used telephone interviews
with representative national samples, so questions on such topics as the president’s
performance or comparisons of local and federal relief efforts often yield comparable
data. Because competing polls are conducted frequently, a question about the president’s
performance can easily yield half a dozen data points across two months.
Results
RQ1 asks which disaster phases are used as organizing frames during the weeks after
a disaster. As Table 1 indicates, the first four weeks of coverage after the hurricane strike
are dominated, perhaps predictably, by nonmitigation phases of coverage: impact (50
percent of articles in the first week) and recovery (75.3 percent in the second week, 67.2
percent in the third. Articles discussing mitigation decline from 11.7 percent to 9.6
percent to less than 5 percent across those three weeks ( 2 = 68.86, df = 9, p < .001).
Mitigation coverage increases in the fourth week (to 10.6 percent), coinciding with the
approach of another hurricane and the reappearance of the warning phase (25.6 percent of
articles). Mitigation-phase articles make up as much as 31 percent of coverage in the four
weeks in which coverage through November is examined, but differences among those
weeks do not reach significance. Those results suggest that when mitigation appears as an
item on the media agenda, it appears late in a disaster if at all. Dominant themes are less
reflective of long-term interests, more news-driven and episodic.
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Table 1: Disaster Phase Frames, by Week
Week
Phase
Warning
2
3
1 ( 2%)a
0 ( 0%)
2 ( 3%)
4
5
6
7
8
Total
17 (26%)
1 ( 4%)
4 (15%)
0 (0%)
0 (0%)
25
Impact
30 (50%)
11 (15%)
15 (25%)
16 (24%)
7 (30%)
6 (23%)
3 (20%)
2 (14%)
90
Recovery
22 (37%)
55 (75%)
41 (67%)
26 (39%)
11 (48%)
8 (31%)
8 (53%)
9 (64%)
180
Mitigation
7 (12%)
7 (10%)
3 ( 5%)
7 (11%)
4 (17%)
8 (31%)
4 (27%)
3 (21%)
43
60
73
61
66
23
26
15
14
Total
a
1
number of stories, with percentage of week’s total in parentheses
112
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Vultee: Frames of Mitigation
RQ2 asks about the relationship between phases of disaster coverage and the
tendency to tell a story through the experience of individual people—personal, as
opposed to structural, framing, which is thought to affect the ways in which audiences
attribute responsibility to those actors and others in news coverage. As Table 2 indicates,
personal-frame articles are most common in the impact phase (34.5 percent of the total)
and recovery phase (32.1 percent) of this disaster, accounting for 18.2 percent of warning
stories and only 12.5 percent of mitigation stories ( 2 = 8.49, df = 3, p < .05). As Table 3
indicates, the personal frame is at its most frequent in the second and third weeks after
impact, at around 37 percent, declining afterward to around 20 percent of coverage ( 2 =
24.09, df = 14, p = .05). RQ2, then, suggests that the more dramatic phases of a disaster
are more likely to be told through personal stories, which are also more prominent during
the weeks closer to the disaster itself.
RQ3 and RQ4 address responsibility: which level of government, state/local or
federal, is more likely to be covered, and whether they are portrayed as carrying out their
normal or expected roles effectively. In the week after the storm’s impact, evacuees’
enthusiasm for federal assistance—“Thank God for FEMA! FEMA rules!”—ran parallel
with their disdain for local government (O’Driscoll 2005). Within weeks, that agency’s
director had been replaced and the president was scheduling events in New Orleans in an
effort to demonstrate his connectedness. How was this sequence portrayed?
Over the period examined for this part of the study (the first two weeks after the
hurricane struck, plus the first weeks of October and November), neither the amount of
coverage mentioning state and local government nor the proportion of favorable to
unfavorable coverage changes significantly ( 2 = .73, df = 3, p > .05, see Table 4). The
amount of coverage of the federal government also does not change significantly, though
coverage of the federal role becomes significantly less favorable: from more than 70
percent in the first week to 55.3 percent in the second week to 20 percent at the beginning
of October ( 2 = 18.15, df = 3, p < .001). Similarly, although the proportion of articles
mentioning local/state vs. federal responsibilities remains about even across the study
period, the decline of favorable mentions of the federal government compared with
state/local government is significant ( 2 = 7.67, df = 3, p = .053). It is worth noting that
none of the articles from November portrayed the federal government favorably.
Comparatively few stories that use mitigation as an organizing frame mention the role
of state or local government (about 41%, see Table 5). Mitigation stories are much more
likely to mention the role of the federal government (about 77%), and when government
roles are mentioned, portrayals of the federal role are much more likely to be negative (by
a ratio of about 7 to 1, compared with 2 to 1 for state and local government).
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Table 2: Personal and Structural Frames During Different Disaster Phases
Disaster phase (number of stories, percentage of total in that phase)
Frame type
Warning
Impact
Personal
4 (18%)
29 (35%)
5 (13%)
52 (32%)
90
Structural
18 (82%)
55 (65%)
35 (87%)
110 (68%)
218
Total
22
Mitigation
84
Recovery
40
Total
308
162
Table 3: Personal and Structural Frames, by Week
Week (number of stories, percentage of week’s total)
Frame
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Total
Personal
10 (18%)
27 (39%)
24 (41%)
15 (26%)
4 (21%)
5 (24%)
3 (23%)
2 (17%)
90
Structural
46 (82%)
43 (61%)
34 (59%)
43 (74%)
15 (79%)
16 (76%)
10 (77%)
10 (83%)
217
Total
56
70
58
58
114
19
21
13
12
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Vultee: Frames of Mitigation
Table 4: Portrayals of Responsibility in Media Accounts; Public Opinion of Bush and Katrina
Week: Percentage (number of stories, where applicable, in parentheses)
8/299/2
9/59/9
9/129/16
9/199-23
9/269/30
Stories mentioning
state/local role
30%
(18)
36%
(26)
39%
(9)
33%
(5)
Proportion mentioning
state/local favorably
56%
(10)
42%
(11)
56%
(5)
60%
(3)
Stories mentioning
federal role
40%
(24)
52%
(38)
44%
(10)
67%
(10)
Proportion mentioning
federal role favorably
71%
(17)
55%
(21)
17%
(2)
0%
Approve Bush overall
41%
42%
40%
44%
45%
37%
39%
Disapprove Bush
overall
51%
52%
58%
54%
50%
58%
58%
Approve Bush on
Katrina
54%
38%
41%
45%
40%
45%
44%
Disapprove Bush on
Katrina
12%
58%
57%
53%
54%
52%
53%
Katrina “most
important problem”
18%
10%
2%
10/310/7
10/1010/14
10/1710/21
10/2410/28
10-3111/4
11/711/11
11/1411-18
37%
37%
38%
59%
61%
57%
(0)
0%
CBS News, 8/29-31; CBS News, 9/6-7; CBS News, 9/12-16; USA Today/CNN/Gallup, 9/16-18; Greenberg/Quinlan/Rosner Research, 9/19-21;
USA/CNN/Gallup, 9/26-28 (71% approve Bush’s handling of Huricane Rita in this poll); CBS News, 10/3-5; Gallup/CNN/USA Today, 10/21-23,
AP/Ipsos, 10/31-11/2; CBS News, 10/31-11/1; AP-Ipsos, 11/7-9; USA Today/CNN/Gallup, 11/17-20. No data for weeks of 10/10, 10/24
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Table 5: Government actors in mitigation stories
Level of government
State/local
Federal
Total
Not appearing
13 (59%)
5 (23%)
18
Appearing
9 (41%)
17 (77%)
26
Total
22
22
44
2 = 4.61, df = 1, p = .032
H1 is addressed by examining the relationship between public assessment of Bush’s
performance and news portrayals of the federal government’s performance. The results in
Table 4 present a nuanced picture that makes a straightforward answer difficult. During
the week the hurricane struck, a survey found that 54 percent approved of Bush’s
handling of the situation, against 12 percent who disapproved. By the following week, the
numbers were 38 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval. To a degree, this reflects a
sharp decline in “don’t know” responses, and the picture over succeeding weeks is less
dismal for the president’s image—at least, with regard to his handling of this particular
hurricane (in one late September survey, 40 percent of respondents approved of Bush’s
handling of Katrina, but 71 percent approved his handling of Hurricane Rita, which
struck in September).
Approval of Bush’s overall performance as president appears to erode slightly over
the study period, and disapproval of his overall performance is higher in mid-November
than at the end of August. Ratings of his handling of Hurricane Katrina, though, appear to
improve: negative assessments are lower and positive assessments higher at the end of
the study period than during the week after the storm—even though coverage of the
federal government’s performance by then is largely to uniformly negative. Thus, H1 is
not supported: Bush’s ratings overall are lower at the end of the period, but ratings of his
performance on the hurricane are improving.
H2 proposed that articles told through a personal frame will be more likely to portray
government actions favorably than articles told through a structural frame. This
hypothesis follows Iyengar’s (1989) association of personal frames with a public sense of
personal responsibility for outcomes; conversely, the structural actor (government)
should appear more favorably in these accounts. H2 thus receives mixed support. When
the role of the federal government is addressed, articles are significantly more likely to
portray the federal government favorably when personal frames are used and to portray it
unfavorably when structural frames are used. The opposite picture appears when state or
local government is involved; personal frames are less favorable to the government and
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structural frames more favorable, though the differences are not significant. This curious
picture points to a complicated set of transactions between the public and the news media
that help shape public understanding of disasters.
Discussion
Media framing helps audiences understand what a story is meant to be “about” and
which organizing slot (individual bravery, official bumbling, the fickleness of nature) it
should occupy. This understanding in turn can help the audience organize its agenda: the
list of issues it sees as problems or priorities. This study supports the relevance of frame
choices in creating public understanding of a natural disaster. It also underscores the
relevance of media accounts in determining whether disasters are conceived as random or
systematic, where audiences might look for accountability, and whether disaster stories
are about drama or about the more mundane process of assessing and ensuring prudent
steps to lessen the threat of potential disasters.
It is little surprise that a disaster’s impact and the recovery from it are not just the
most common organizing tools for disaster stories but the most likely events to be told in
a personal way, rather than a structural way. In this study period, mitigation emerges as a
prominent frame only in the later stages. That emergence comes about not because more
mitigation stories are being written—that number remains fairly constant—but because
fewer hurricane stories in general are being written (in this case, an average of four or
five stories a day, rather than a dozen or more). The data suggest that hazard mitigation is
a plausible topic but not necessarily the first to suggest itself. Journalists and other
communicators—or the experts those communicators call on—might have to work to
make the mitigation frame more compelling, perhaps by seeking ways to personalize it.
Personal frames are apparently not without effects of their own, though. Federal
performance looks notably better when personal frames—in Iyengar’s (1991)
conceptualization, stories that make for “good pictures”—are chosen and notably worse
when structural frames are used. The demands of storytelling may have an impact on
public opinion about a disaster, and thus on the disaster’s political outcomes, that is
separate from the facts conveyed in the story itself.
Mitigation is largely portrayed as a matter involving the federal government, rather
than state and local government. This could reflect the sheer scale of the response to this
particular disaster, the role of the federal government in flood control, or the tendency of
media reports to embody a national response in the presidency, but it also suggests the
importance of not forgetting elements of mitigation, such as building-safety codes,
interagency communication, or disaster planning, that are largely or exclusively the
domain of state or local government. It is also worth asking whether media concentration
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Vultee: Frames of Mitigation
on the highly public errors of the federal government obscured an equally important
critical assessment of responses below the federal level.
The significant change in evaluations of Bush’s post-Katrina performance—
specifically, the large changes in views of Bush’s Katrina performance compared to the
relatively small changes in his overall performance—suggests that agenda-setting
mechanisms do not always work in tandem. In this case, the second level of agendasetting, in which increased media attention raises not just the salience of an agenda item
but the salience of attributes (such as competence or incompetence), appears to have been
overridden by the first level of agenda-setting: The president is someone who does
presidential things (replacing the head of FEMA, flying to Texas to monitor a second
hurricane), rather than someone who does those things well or poorly. Thus, as the Iraq
war (in its 30th month when Katrina struck) dragged on and Bush’s ratings continued
downward, the presence of episodic “storytelling” moments allows the chief executive to
look presidential while concern about the performance of federal agencies is absorbed
elsewhere or simply fails to emerge at all. Disapproval of Bush’s Katrina performance
declines even as Katrina itself recedes in opinion surveys asking an open-ended question
about the “most important problem” facing the country.
But coverage of Katrina does not vanish as public concern wanes; in the week
beginning Oct. 31, 2005, when Katrina no longer registered as a “most important
problem,” USA Today still carried 18 articles about the storm in its five issues. This is
also the time period in which mitigation coverage is proportionately highest, although
that proportion reflects more of a decline in other stories than an increase in mitigation
stories. Disasters and disaster mitigation are clearly still news, but apparently not the sort
of news that drives a public agenda. Whether that finding represents, or should represent,
a concern that could be addressed under the banner of “civic” or “public” journalism is a
topic for further study in different areas.
Public perceptions and press coverage of disasters are also worth considering in light
of ongoing efforts to realize emergency management in the context of the Department of
Homeland Security. When proposed legislation would permit loans for 9/11 losses to be
made from a disaster relief and mitigation fund (“Whatever It Takes,” 2005), it is clear
that the concepts of large-scale disasters and mass-casualty terrorism are already
considered similar if not identical for many purposes. Such news organizations as CNN
see natural disasters, war, and terrorism as similar training grounds for crisis coverage
(Zurawik 2006). Lessons from one kind of crisis coverage should be applicable to crises
in other domains as well. But at the same time, concerns have been raised that the
pendulum has swung too far toward political violence at the expense of nature’s own
violence: “Apparently homeland security now consists almost entirely of protection
against terrorist acts,” one emergency management official warns. “Given our country's
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long record of natural disasters, how much sense does this make?” (Holderman, 2005, p.
A17) Public and media expectations of a strong federal role in disaster response suggest
that such concerns are not misplaced.
The study has some limitations that lead to suggestions for future research. First,
although USA Today is an important resource for studying the content of national
nonprestige media, it remains a single source, raising a possibility of biases and
confounds that cannot be accounted for. Given that news content tends to be redundant
across news outlets (Ryfe, 2006) and that different media monitor each other in the
course of determining their own agendas, that is a shortcoming that could be left for
future studies. The reductions in news space and staff size that have become common in
newspapers in the latter part of this decade suggest that cross-outlet similarities in the
coverage of national news will grow more pronounced, with greater reliance on news
agencies or supplemental services rather than staff-produced coverage. Future research
will also want to incorporate Internet-based or all-news-TV coverage as well as the
growth of such interactive technologies as microblogging.
Second, this study is also limited in its ability to establish causal or directional
relationships with confidence. A significant difference in public perceptions of “federal”
and “presidential” roles, suggested by the data, could mean that some third cause is
driving both news coverage and public opinion. Further, several relevant aspects of
framing proved too difficult to operationalize and measure for this study. A more detailed
look at how victims and victimization are portrayed, and at how the impact of a disaster
is framed, would offer important avenues for future research.
The political echoes of the Katrina disaster also suggest the relevance of examining
later hurricane coverage to see whether mitigation reports have become more prominent
in general. Greater long-term attention to this undramatic but essential element of disaster
preparation would be a happy outcome of that genuinely national nightmare.
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Appendix 1: Coding Instructions: Disaster and Mitigation.
This study will look in USA Today for any articles including the word ‘hurricane’ in
the A or B (news and money) sections in late 2005. The unit of analysis is the individual
story. Excluded are letters to the editor and articles in which ‘hurricane’ is only
mentioned in passing. For example, this sentence from a 2,200-word cover story on sex
offenders would not be coded: “Under a new policy, Florida bans certain sex offenders
from public hurricane shelters, many of which are in schools.” If a story appears in
multiple editions, only the version from the “Final” edition is used. If a story appears to
mention hurricanes or other natural disasters only tangentially, it should not be coded.
Consult with the primary investigator if in doubt.
Code each article for the appearance of several frames, as follows:
Disaster Frame
This frame deals with the phase of disaster that a story contains or mentions most
prominently. Each story can be placed in one of four frames. Circle the number of the
frame that best fits the story:
1) Warning. Stories in the warning category deal with the possibility or likelihood
that a specific hazard or type of hazard will strike in a particular area. General
statements about the nature of a hazards or disaster do not count as warnings.
Statements about the potential of a particular hazard, including predictions about
an upcoming storm season are included.
2) Impact. The impact phase includes stories that cover the impact of the disaster on
people, property, or the environment. These stories start when the disaster occurs
but can continue for some time.
3) Recovery. Stories in this category deal with efforts to restore the normal functions
of life after the disruptions caused by the disaster.
4) Mitigation. Stories in this category deal with “any sustained action taken to
reduce or eliminate long-term risk to life and property from a hazard event”
(FEMA). It is important to distinguish these stories from stories about the
recovery process or other parts of a disaster. Mitigation stories look at measures
that have been taken, are being taken or should be taken to reduce the likelihood
of a specific kind of hazard or lessen or redistribute its impact on people or
property. Here are some examples:
a. A story about insurance payments to victims of a disaster is a recovery
story. A story about the possibility that insurance rates will generally
increase is an impact story. A story about whether insurance rates should
be increased for dwellings and businesses in hurricane-prone areas would
be a mitigation story.
b. A story reporting that fuel prices are increasing in the wake of a disaster is
an impact story. A story reporting that oil is being released from the
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Vultee: Frames of Mitigation
Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a recovery story. A story examining
whether average fuel economy standards should be raised or fuel
consumption reduced is a mitigation story.
c. A story about the number of dwellings damaged is an impact story. A
story about how quickly the repairs are proceeding is a recovery story. A
story about building codes is a mitigation story.
Personal/Structural Frame
This frame examines whether a story is told in terms of specific events and people or
in abstract terms, such as policy. It is derived from the concept of episodic and thematic
framing explained here:
The episodic frame depicts public issues in terms of concrete instances or
specific events—a homeless person . . . or an attempted murder—which
make ‘good pictures.’ The thematic news frame, in contrast, places public
issues in some general or abstract context, which typically takes the form
of a ‘takeout’ or ‘backgrounder’ report, frequently featuring ‘talking
heads.’ (Iyengar et al., 1993)
Not all stories will contain this frame. Stories that do not reflect the personal/structural
frame should be marked 0. Often, a story that quotes several individual officials will still
reflect a structural frame. It is also possible that stories can contain both frames. Stories
that do reflect this frame should be marked on a three-point scale:
1) Personal frame dominant
2) Both frames reflected equally
3) Structural frame dominant
Responsibility Frame
Here, you will be coding each story for two concepts: whether a particular level of
government is mentioned, and whether it is mentioned favorably or unfavorably.
Does the story describe the actions or responsibilities of state and/or local
governments? (NOTE: Actions or responsibilities are not necessarily described if an
official is quoted, particularly if the official is commenting on natural phenomena or
news developments)
0= no
1= yes
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Vultee: Frames of Mitigation
If yes, indicate whether these governments were portrayed favorably or unfavorably.
A favorable portrayal is one in which the government or agency is shown as carrying out
its duties competently and efficiently or going above and beyond those requirements. An
unfavorable portrayal can include failure to carry out normal responsibilities; failure to
recognize responsibilities; corruption; poor or unwise spending; inadequate or improperly
directed funding; belated efforts to carry out 'normal' duties. If the tone of an article or of
the people in it is predominantly critical despite the actor's efforts, count the article as
unfavorable.
0= no mention
1 = yes, favorable
2 = yes, unfavorable.
Does the story describe the actions or responsibilities of the federal government?
(Members of Congress might fit either category; they should be coded as state/local
actors if that is the venue in which they are portrayed)
0= no
1= yes
If yes, indicate whether these governments were portrayed favorably or unfavorably.
A favorable portrayal is one in which the government or agency is shown as carrying out
its duties competently and efficiently or going above and beyond those requirements. An
unfavorable portrayal can include failure to carry out normal responsibilities; failure to
recognize responsibilities; corruption; poor or unwise spending; inadequate or improperly
directed funding; belated efforts to carry out 'normal' duties. If the tone of an article or of
the people in it is predominantly critical despite the actor's efforts, count the article as
unfavorable.
0= no mention
1 = yes, favorable
2 = yes, unfavorable.
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