‘Breakfast is Now Tea, Toast and Tissues’: Affect and the Media Coverage of Bushfires

Abstract

Print and electronic media coverage of disasters raises a multitude of issues about the media's role during and after a crisis. This article focuses on a specific issue: the affective dimension of news media coverage immediately following a crisis. The selection and presentation of bushfire stories not only disseminates information but elicits emotion from audiences. I use textual and visual analysis of The Age newspaper's coverage of the 2009 Victorian bushfires to examine the discursive structuring of affect. Comparisons are made with coverage of earlier bushfire disasters (the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and the 1939 Black Friday fires) in order to investigate changes in the visual and verbal discourses of bushfire reporting. The article demonstrates that there is an intensification of affect in contemporary media coverage that is not present in the coverage of previous bushfires, and that this has implications for the role of the emotions in public life and for our conception of the public sphere.