Abstract

In 2007, a group of experts on mental health proposed five elements that would protect and promote the spontaneous recovery of the population exposed to potentially traumatic events. Those elements are: a sense of safety; calming; a sense of self– and community efficacy; connectedness; and hope (Hobfoll et al, 2007). After a potentially traumatic event occurs, such as a natural disaster, the media, particularly television, are faced with playing a double role. On the one hand, they are called to supervise authority (Donohue, Tichenor & Olien 1995, Schultz, 1998; McNair, 2000) in terms of how it manages the disaster (Lowrey et al, 2007; Houston, Pfefferbaum y Rosenholtz, 2012), while on the other hand they support the affected population in returning to normal by providing adequate information during the first hours after the disaster (Barnes, 2008; CNTV, 2010; Hight y Smyth, 2003). Thus, the media, without expressly seeking it, will fulfill a role of protecting mental health, facilitating the spontaneous recovery of the population and reducing the probability that people affected will develop an associated mental condition, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, etc. (Hobfoll et al, 2007). The underlying question of this research is how are Hobfoll’s five elements present in the news coverage after a disaster? Hence, if the elements are considered in the news this would promote the spontaneous recovery of the affected people, reducing their probability of developing a mental disorder. This paper presents the first results of an exploratory analysis on the capacity of the media, particularly television (four main public access Chilean television networks), of including the five elements in their news stories. An interdisciplinary team developed a classification methodology according to the elements proposed, allowing the team to conduct an exploratory analysis of the 1,169 news stories aired during the first 72 hours of broadcast, after the earthquake on February 27, 2010 (8.8 Richter). The methodology developed an expert consensus codebook with exclusion criteria in order to classify the elements. Afterwards, two coders were trained to classify the stories, using a sample of 50 of them (different from and in addition to the 1,169 included in the final analysis) in order to calculate reliability, achieving a Krippendorff α of 0.79 with the ReCal2 software (Freelon, 2010). A total of 98.9% of the news stories reviewed could be classified within some of the five elements. Only 12 stories did not include any of the elements proposed by Hobfoll. In addition, the greatest amount of news stories fall into the “sense of safety” element (77%), while the rest contribute to a lesser extent to the other four elements. Only one story was linked to the “connectedness” element. The study also analyzed how several stories linked to the five elements began appearing throughout the first 24 hours after the earthquake. Figure 1 depicts how the “sense of safety” element strongly stands out over the rest. As a preliminary conclusion, there is an open debate on the potential role of journalism in times of emergency and on whether or not the media should take on the responsibility of helping affected people in returning to a normal situation as part of their function. This is due to the fact that the information delivered is a protecting factor for the population exposed to a catastrophe, people who may have suffered the loss of loved ones, property, and certainty and who need support for their spontaneous recovery in order to minimize psychological damage.