The mass media can and often do play a significant role in disasters

Summary and Conclusions 
As shown in this book, scholars in many disciplines – Sociology, Geography, 
Political Science, Law, Public Administration, Economics to name just a few – have 
discovered a great deal about human and organizational behavior in crisis and disaster. 
Some of that scholarship has focused on the role of the mass media and, as a result, we 
know a great deal about the roles media can and do perform before, during and after 
disasters. This includes warning, keeping people informed in the aftermath of disaster, 
correcting rumours. Journalism scholars have added to that knowledge, pointing out, for 
example, that journalists are often troubled by ethical issues, that television is becoming 
the source of first choice in crises and that there is a great deal of interaction between 
media and interpersonal sources. Scholars in more than one discipline have shown that 
electronic media perform differently than print media in crises: the latter have more time 
to shape the news using established Gatekeeping procedures. 
Yet much of the knowledge that scholars in other disciplines have acquired about 
the media and disaster has not made it into the reporting texts and much of the 
scholarship by media scholars has not been integrated into the disaster literature. Thus, 
while news stories all too often reflect these myths both in what they include and what 
they omit, others still misunderstand the effects of journalistic behavior and the way it 
impacts on victims of disaster. A review of the role of the media in disasters suggests that 

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the media and disasters are inevitably intertwined but in many ways they are still 
strangers.
These findings do suggest two lessons for those in positions of responsibility 
during crises or disasters. The first one is that the media can play a critical role before, 
during and after such incidents. The media are essential, for example, for warnings to be 
effective and may be the single most important source of public information in the wake 
of a disaster. The second lesson is that the media have to be monitored and handled with 
care because it is media reports that distort what happens in a disaster and lead to 
misunderstandings. Failure by officials to issue a warning, for example, may be a result 
of myths created by the media.