How Loud Rumbles Hit Newsstands: A Data Analysis of Coverage and Spatial Bias in German News about Landslides Around the World

2026-05-18

AI Summary

This study reveals significant geographic bias in German media coverage of global landslide disasters. Analyzing nearly 60,000 German-language news articles over a 25-year period and employing geolocation and event-matching techniques, the research systematically quantifies reporting patterns for 5,500 landslide events worldwide and compares them against national landslide susceptibility data. The findings demonstrate a pronounced preference for covering landslides in Southern and Western Europe, while high-risk regions elsewhere receive disproportionately little attention. This work presents the first systematic assessment of spatial bias in international disaster reporting, offering empirical evidence to inform efforts toward more equitable global disaster communication and the development of balanced, representative landslide databases.

Abstract

Landslides often hit newsstands due to their destructive and potentially fatal effects. News are a valuable source of information for creating or enriching disaster databases and for expediting media-based studies of the dynamics of media attention. To accomplish that, news datasets must be filtered, geolocated and validated. This paper focuses on how landslides around the world are reported in German newspapers. We analyse almost 60k news articles about 5.5k news events in a 25-year period, compare it with external measures of countries' susceptibility to landslides and provide insights, e.g.~the overreporting of Southern and Western Europe, to foment further studies on inequalities in media attention to international disasters.

Problem

• landslides
• media bias
• spatial bias
• news coverage
• disaster reporting

Innovation

• media bias
• geolocation
• disaster reporting
• spatial inequality
• news dataset