Feeling the catastrophe: the interplay between emotional story-telling and journalistic authority in the televisual construction of natural disasters

Abstract

Natural disasters not only create physical damage but also disrupt social norms. Studying disasters and their media representations thus reveals how a society establishes and maintains its political structure and cultural values. Focusing on Typhoon Morakot, Taiwan’s deadliest typhoon on record, this study employs a ritual view of communication to examine its first week of television coverage. The study found that a variety of televisual practices, such as the interruption of commercials, live reporting, visualization of emotions, and cinematic vignettes, have been used to symbolically repair a shaken society. This case study adds to the literature of disaster journalism as it improves our understanding of mediated crises as visual texts constituted by facts and feelings and addresses the gap in the traditional epistemological assumption that journalism is a product of rationality and objectivity.