The role of media in community resilience: Hindsight bias in media narratives after the 2014 Genoa flood

Abstract Aim: A massive flood due to exceptional rainfalls devastated the town of Genoa on 9 October 2014. Media reports focused on the disaster, its causes and the political accountabilities. Reading facts after the event is commonly biased by the hindsight perspective and the aim of the paper is to investigate the amount and the potential effects of hindsight bias in terms of citizens risk perception and community resilience. Method: We performed a qualitative analysis of the narratives in the national and local news reports during the aftermath to investigate occurrences of a blaming attitude and cognitive biases. Results: The results showed a considerable amount of sentences that were focused on blaming the forecasters, the Civil Protection System, and the local administration. Many narratives were affected by hindsight bias and described the events as simple and linear chain reactions. This led to counterfactual biases, assuming that a simple intervention on a single factor could have prevented the tragic outcome. Conclusion: We claim that the biased nature of the media narratives could affect the citizens’ risk perception and their attitude towards the institutions, increasing their exposure to future flood-related threats. We propose the appropriate language would generate correct cognitive frames and, therefore, safer behaviour.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Geopolitical, Social Security and Freedom Journal

• Publication date

  2018-11-01

• Fields of study

  Political Science, Sociology, Environmental Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2478/gssfj-2018-0007
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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