Media Coverage of the Northridge and North Coast Earthquakes

Media Coverage of the Northridge and North Coast Earthquakes in California

Christine M. Rodrigue, Department of Geography, California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840-1101

USA, [email protected]

Eugenie Rovai, Department of Geography and Planning, California State University, Chico, CA 95929-0425 USA, [email protected]

Susan E. Place; School of Graduate, International, and Sponsored Programs; California State University, Chico, CA 95929-0875 USA, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Earthquakes, like many disasters, impart differential effects on the populations of the affected regions. Variations occur, in part, because the concentration of the energies released in an earthquake interact with microseismic conditions in soils and slopes, as well as differences in the susceptibility of the built environments through which they pass. These differential impacts, however, also reflect variations in vulnerability among human groups within an area impacted by an earthquake. Social groups may vary substantially in their ability to mitigate and recover from disaster. These variations often reflect differential access to resources, which often fall along consistent axes of vulnerability, including class, race and ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, literacy, religion, and disability, in effect, anything that might stigmatize or injure a group and affect its ability to collect personal resources or command social resources. This paper suggests

1149

that an additional factor may come into play: media coverage of a hazardous event, such as an earthquake. This comparative study of the 1994 Northridge and 1992 North Coast earthquakes in California focuses on the rôle of media in marginalizing and prioritizing different groups in the affected regions, and the impacts of differential visibility on communities' recovery. In both case studies, media showed uneven coverage along income and racial lines, and media geographies affected local residents' mental maps of the disasters. Our research suggests that recovery rates were skewed not only by differential access to resources but also by media representation.

INTRODUCTION

In the early morning of January 17, 1994, a magnitude 6.7 (Mw) earthquake shook the Los Angeles area (Figure 1). There were several spectacular collapses of buildings and freeways, including the Northridge Meadows apartment building, in which 16 people died when the first floor failed. Estimates of those killed by the quake range from 57 (e.g., U.S. Geological Survey 1996) to 72 people (e.g., Federal Emergency Management Agency 1998). 11,846 people were injured to the point of seeking or being brought to medical attention (FEMA 1998 ). Although loss of life was moderate by global standards, damage to property was enormous. Current estimates include $16.6 billion in insured property loss in 1999 dollars, $9.5 billion in Federal financial assistance (Torregrosso et al. 2002), $6.5 billion in business interruption costs in 1994 dollars (Gordon and Richardson 1995), and $20 billion in hidden uninsured losses, including deductibles paid by insured homeowners, repairs paid out of pocket, and damages to uninsured buildings (Platt 2000). Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the January 17 Northridge earthquake

1150

were considered the costliest natural disasters in United States history until September 11th, 2001. Northridge and Andrew have since been superseded by the sociogenic disasters of "9/11," with insurance payments exceeding $30 billion (Torregrosso et al. 2002) and total costs exceeding $100 billion (Institute for the Analysis of Global Security 2004), and Hurricane Katrina with $125 billion in economic losses, including $45 billion in insured losses alone (Munich RE 2005).

*** Fig. 1 ***

Catastrophic earthquakes strike rural portions of California as readily as they do urban areas. On April 25-26, 1992, three powerful temblors with magnitudes 7.2, 6.5, and 6.7 (Engdahl and Villaseñor 2002; Oppenheimer et al. 1993) struck the rural Humboldt County area on the northwest coast of California (Rovai 1994). The first shock was about 24 km east of the town of Petrolia and 15 km south-southeast of Rio Dell and Scotia, while the epicenter of the second was 4 km southwest of Ferndale and 6 km north of Petrolia. The third struck just offshore about 1.5 km off Cape Mendocino, northwest of Petrolia and southwest of Ferndale (Figure 2). This series of earthquakes did very serious damage to the small towns of the area, including Ferndale, Fortuna, Honeydew, Petrolia, Rio Dell, and Scotia, amounting to $61 million in 1992 dollars (Rovai 1994). Given the magnitudes of these quakes, it was extremely fortunate that no-one was killed by the quakes themselves, though one Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) worker was killed subsequently in the course of assessing damage, and 98 people were injured (NOAA 1997).

1151

*** Fig. 2 *** Such disasters have differential impact on various segments of the affected population. Obviously, differential impacts reflect the particular focal dynamics and physical properties of the underlying lithology and the seismic responses of structures and other infrastructure, together with the location of people and their belongings with respect to these. Less obviously, the social geography and history of the affected area also produce differential vulnerability to disaster among various populations.

Vulnerability is a function of risk, but it cannot be conflated with it entirely (Rodrigue 1993). One is vulnerable to a hazard through the risk of a specified event taking place in a given timeframe and the probability that one will be at a location where the energies released in the event can kill or injure human life or destroy or damage assets. More than statistical risk, though, social vulnerability reflects access to knowledge about an event, ability to evade it or mitigate its impacts, and, most importantly, capacity to recover from a disaster through command of personal resources or effective demand for social resources. This chapter focuses on the rôle of the media in constructing vulnerability after the Northridge and North Coast earthquakes. Specifically, the paper documents the spatial patterns of damages from both earthquakes and then compares them with the spatial patterns in media attention and relates these two geographies to vulnerability patterns in each earthquake.

THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF LOS ANGELES AND HUMBOLDT COUNTY

1152

Los Angeles is culturally an extremely diverse city, with strong spatial segregation of its various racial, ethnic, and national groups and socio-economic classes (Booza, Cutsinger, and Galster 2006; Ethington, Frey, and Myers 2001). Residential segregation has led to extreme crowding in areas of recent immigration and to tremendous suburban sprawl as "white flight" (and, indeed, some "black flight") creates the "edge city" phenomenon described by Garreau on the periphery ringing the Los Angeles metropolitan area (1991). This process accelerated during the 1970s and 1980s as a result of globalization-related plant closings in established Fordist-style heavy industrial areas, such as South Central Los Angeles, South Gate, and Compton, which traditionally anchored non-white working and middle class residential zones. At the same time, the persistence and increase of labor-intensive craft factories and sweatshops supported a rapid influx of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Asia, resulting in an ethnic sea-change in many Los Angeles neighborhoods, intense overcrowding, and socio-economic polarization to an extent unusual in the United States (Booza, Cutsinger, and Galster 2006). One outcome was an explosion in the number of languages spoken in the city and linguistic isolation for many immigrant communities.

In the context of a kaleidoscope of different political jurisdictions in the metropolitan Los Angeles area, these industrial and demographic changes translate into very complicated problems when a disaster strikes (Wisner 1994). Emergency response and subsequent recovery are all compromised by the large number of different political jurisdictions that need to be coördinated (Bolin and Stanford 1998). This is made doubly difficult by the budgetary problems caused by the declining tax base in the older central city communities, strong resistance to paying taxes by the denizens of the affluent edge cities in politically independent suburban jurisdictions, and the

1153

authority of the State of California to siphon revenues from municipalities and counties during budgetary downturns to balance its own budget.

The North Coast of California has a different array of conditions and problems, which also produces variations in vulnerability to earthquake hazard. Like many peripheral areas, this region has traditionally depended heavily on primary sector activities, notably lumbering, fishing, and farming. As with the old industrial core of Los Angeles, the North State has also seen blue collar job loss, particularly as the lumber mills closed down due to competition from Mexico and Japan. There has been some increase in tourism, especially around the picturesque and relatively prosperous dairying town of Ferndale (known for its well-preserved Victorian homes). Ethnic change is occurring in the North Coast, too. In this case, the lumber mills had supported communities of Italian immigrants and their descendants (e.g., Scotia and Rio Dell). Younger people from this community have largely left the area, leaving older and increasingly female survivors of the Italian community. Real property has been depressed by this outmigration, leaving the emigrant children with their families' homes, which they cannot sell and in which they do not wish to live. Many have turned to renting these residences out, again in a depressed market. At the same time, there has been an influx of non-Italian welfare recipients, especially from the San Francisco Bay Area, who are trying to make their meager dole stretch further in the drastically cheaper rental market of the old mill towns. There has been some counter-cultural migration from the Bay Area, too (especially around Petrolia), one of the last enclaves of the hippie tradition of the 1960s.

1154

LITERATURE REVIEW

As seen in the rest of this book, earthquakes are the subject of research by scholars in a great variety of disciplines. The various geosciences generally focus on the physical generation of the events themselves, the propagation of their energies, and the redistribution of stress associated with them, while engineers concentrate on structural responses to these stresses and mitigations to earthquakes in various seismological and technological settings. The emphasis here is the social science approach to hazards.

The Social Science of Hazards and Disaster

The classic social science literature on natural hazards stems from the work of White (1942, 1964), Kates (1962), and Burton and Kates (1964). This work and the work it inspired explored social and individual risk to natural hazard and perceptions of risk on the part of potential victims, as well as behavioral adjustments to perceived or experienced hazard on the part of affected individuals and individuals in agencies involved in emergency response or hazard planning and mitigation (e.g., Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Johnson 1993; Kunreuther 2000; Margolis 1996; Mulilis and DuVal 1995; Palm 1995; Saarinen 1966; Sorkin 1982). In many ways, this tradition features a very individualistic conception of society. Society and its institutions are represented as aggregations of individuals, who try more or less rationally to optimize their private benefit to cost ratios in their behavior toward potentially hazardous situations (Watts 1983).

1155

In 1977, Haas, Kates, and Bowden created a classification of institutional reaction to disaster, dividing the post-disaster period into four stages: Emergency response, restoration, replacement reconstruction, and betterment reconstruction. Their book identifies a list of activities common to each of these often overlapping phases, which are quite recognizable in media coverage of the post-disaster period. More controversially, they argued that each stage peaks at a point in time that is an order of magnitude longer (base 10) than the peak of the preceding stage. If response peaks about a week after a disaster, restoration will peak about 10 weeks after the disaster, for example. Their intent was to give disaster managers an idea of how long the full reconstruction process might take if they knew the duration of the first one or two phases. Critics have attacked the rigidity of the logarithmic phasing and pointed out that the different phases overlap in time and, depending on local circumstances, may well not follow the predicted sequence (e.g., Berke, et al. 1993; Bolin 1994; Neal 2004; Rubin, et al. 1985).

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, another, less individualistic and institutional approach had emerged from work on natural hazards in mostly Third World contexts (Bates et al. 1963; Blaikie et al. 1994; Liverman 1990; Rivers 1982; Rossi 1993; Susman, O'Keefe, and Wisner 1983; Watts 1983; Wisner 1977, 1994, 2001; Wisner, Westgate, and O'Keefe 1976). This approach focusses on the structure of social groupings based on certain common interests; hence, this tradition is sometimes called the structural approach. These can include classes differentiated by income, source of income, and socio-political power or influence. Some of these might variously include peasants, landless peasants (“rural proletarians”), major landowners, family farmers in the First World, workers in industry or services, participants in the “informal economy,” small business owners, professionals, high level managers and

1156

shareholders in major corporations, soldiers, and military leaders. Other groupings include gender; people with disabilities; aged people and children; ethnic, racial, linguistic, and/or religious minorities; and people with minority sexual orientations or behaviors. At the level of the individual or household, there may be complex memberships in more than one of these groupings, leading to social stresses and conflicting loyalties within an individual or household, which may play out in unpredictable ways during a disaster. These differences in interest and conflicting identities result in differing perceptions of and responses to a hazard, and the hazards perception community has explored these distinctions (e.g., Blanchard-Boehm 1997; Mulilis 1999).

Under normal circumstances, the interests of one group may quite often conflict, sometimes sharply, with the interests of various others. Such differences in interest may be exacerbated during a disaster. Classes, however, do not have equal access to power: Dominant classes and groups can impose constraints on the behavioral options of subordinated classes and groups, making them even more vulnerable to the effects of an extreme event (Wisner 1977, 2001). Perhaps they are forced to live in the riskiest locations and buildings: It may be a “choice” of living and working in a hazardous place or not working and living at all. Perhaps subordinated groups have little access to information about what to do in a disaster, and very commonly they have little to no command of personal or societal resources for rescue or recovery from a disaster (Blaikie et al. 1994). People belonging to the subordinated groups may become invisible during an emergency, deepening their vulnerability (Wisner 1998; La Opinión 1994). In many cases, the normal living and working conditions of the most marginalized people are little distinguishable from catastrophe, calling into question the meaning of “restoration” of

1157

“normalcy” (Blaikie et al. 1994). As Bates et al. pointed out (1963), a disaster accelerates existing trends toward economic decline in a community already afflicted by lack of resources.

The poorest people are the most vulnerable, especially those in the informal sector and the secondary labor market (Blaikie et al. 1994; Wisner 1998). In Los Angeles, recent immigrants are frequently hidden in the informal sector and, thus, marginalized. Their economic situations, already highly precarious, make them extremely fragile in a disaster, such as this earthquake. An anecdote from La Opinión, the dominant Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles, illustrates the obstacles faced by people in such circumstances in obtaining relief and rebuilding their lives following a disaster. A Central American woman, who had been working as a live-in domestic/nanny with a family in the San Fernando Valley in exchange for room and board and a small amount of money, found herself homeless and jobless following the January 17 earthquake. The family with whom she had lived left their damaged home to move in with relatives, where there was no room for the domestic. She was unable to obtain aid, because she had no proof of having lost home or employment as a result of the earthquake (La Opinión1994).

In Humboldt County, there was a marked difference in the experiences of those displaced by the quakes in the more prosperous Ferndale and in the more marginal Rio Dell. In Ferndale, there were no tent cities, because relatives and friends of the displaced parties had spacious enough quarters to accommodate them. In Rio Dell, fully ten percent of the population (300 people) were displaced, many into tent cities. Makeshift shelters were visible for over seven months in the form of tents throughout the town and near the local grammar school. Manufactured mobile homes were then brought in, and the people living in tents moved into this more solid form of

1158

temporary housing. Some officials became concerned that outside transient populations were exacerbating the displacement issue in Rio Dell by taking advantage of the mobile homes meant to house the permanent residents of the community who had been displaced by earthquake damages to their homes (Rovai 1994).

This chapter focusses on the equity, or differential efficiency, of social response to disaster, which places this chapter in the more structural social science literature. Of particular concern is the rôle of the media in constructing the mental map of a disaster as it may affect response, restoration, and reconstruction. Does media coverage represent actual damages and impacts on all kinds of victims more or less equitably? Does media coverage affect response, restoration, and reconstruction?

Media Criticism

Media coverage has been the subject of an extensive critical literature. Themes in this scholarship include risk amplification (sensationalism) and attenuation, emergency mass communication, biases in coverage, and agenda-setting. A common criticism is of the sensationalism many media bring to hazard stories, which can amplify public concern inappropiately or even hamper efforts to respond to a disaster (Bennett 2002; Elliott 1989; Fishman 1978; Friedman 1994; Kasperson and Kasperson 1991; Kasperson et al. 1988; Mazur 1998; Scanlon 1989; Smith 1992). Alternatively, by not focussing on an important hazard in the pre-disaster period, media can attenuate the development of public concern and pressure on

1159

decision-makers to deal with a risky situation (Kasperson and Kasperson 1991; Rodrigue 2001a, 2001b).

There is a large body of generic media criticism mostly targeted to an educated lay audience with progressive political sympathies, which is not focussed on hazards and disaster coverage but offers insights into such coverage (e.g., Bagdikian 1997; Cohen and Solomon 1995, 1993; Gans 1989; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Lee and Solomon 1991; Schechter, Browne, and McChesney 1997; Stevens 1998). This work identifies a variety of filters purported to bias media selection of newsworthy items from the chaos of daily events, of which the most often cited are capital concentration in media and media dependence on advertising revenue. The intense capital concentration in the media is argued to limit critical public debate on issues involving parent corporations and encourages sensational coverage, which is so common in the reporting on hazards and disasters. Dependence on advertising revenue encourages disproportionate coverage of topics of interest to the usually prosperous demographic segments the advertisers are trying to attract. Conversely, those with little purchasing power are likely to see few of their concerns covered by the media on a regular basis, and what coverage they do receive fits their experiences into common story frames about minority and/or poor people and their neighborhoods: violence, crime, despair, drugs, and wanton behavior (Street 2005). With an eye to advertisers, some editors explicitly discourage reporters spending time on events in poor or minority neighborhoods (Davidson 2003).

HYPOTHESES

1160

Given these filters, three hypotheses were tested. First, it can be expected that media reportage may emphasize more socially and economically privileged areas in a chaotic natural disaster situation. Second, the significance of such disparities, should there prove to be such a tendency in reporting, is that emergency, recovery, and reconstruction activities may be allocated to affected areas on the basis of residents’ and disaster management personnel's mental maps of damage, themselves shaped by media. Residents' mental maps are, thus, expected to resemble the media geography of attention more than the actual geography of damage. Third, the possible result of media-skewed mental maps would be that better-off communities may secure thereby earlier and more disaster relief. While everyone in coastal, desert, and Sierran California is at significant risk to the earthquake hazard (California Geological Survey 2003; U.S. Geological Survey 2004), uneven performance of reconstruction can mitigate vulnerability for more affluent communities and exacerbate vulnerability for the more marginalized (Blaikie et al. 1994: Ch. 8).

DATA AND METHODS

To determine if media coverage emphasized more privileged communities, coverage must be related to the geography of actual damages. The question is whether such areas received media attention that was disproportionately greater than the damages suffered. To determine whether recovery processes are roughly equitable, some means must be devised to track recovery in socio-economically disparate communities. Data collection differed in the two cases considered here, due to the great differences between the small town and rural setting of Humboldt County and the megacity context of Los Angeles.

1161

Humboldt County

Based on the local knowledge of one of the authors (Rovai), it was decided to contrast two communities close to the epicenter cluster that represent different ends of the local socioeconomic spectrum and that also had experienced roughly similar dollar damages from the North Coast temblors. The two communities that fit these criteria were Ferndale (population 1,3331) and Rio Dell (population 3,012). The 1990 U.S. Census reports that Ferndale has a higher per capita income than Rio Dell, $13,504 versus $9,559, respectively. In terms of educational attainment, fully 39% of the Ferndale population aged 25 and older possessed a college or professional degree, compared with only 9% in Rio Dell. Occupationally, 32% of the Ferndale labor force were engaged in managerial and professional specialties, while only 5% of the Rio Dell labor force were so engaged; only 10% of the Ferndale workforce were engaged in bluecollar occupations, while 29% of the Rio Dell workers were. Only 3% of the Ferndale labor force were not employed, while fully 18% of the Rio Dell were without work.

Public assistance figures tell a similar story: Only 8% of the Ferndale population received public assistance, while 25% of the Rio Dell population were on some form of public assistance. While the percentage of government-subsidized residents in Rio Dell is more than triple that of Ferndale, the total dollar value of the government assistance they receive is 8 times as great as in Ferndale ($219,062 in Ferndale and $1,700,000 in Rio Dell). Home values in Rio Dell are markedly lower than in Ferndale, with the median home value in Rio Dell only $67,100, compared with $111,700 in Ferndale (U.S. Census 1990).

1162

With respect to earthquake damages, the two communities were nearly identical in terms of dollar damages. Ferndale suffered $10.0 million of losses, while Rio Dell experienced $10.4 million. While these damages are distributed over more people in the larger Rio Dell, the great difference in property values in the two communities meant that the same dollar damages produced greater physical damage in Rio Dell.

The disparity can be seen in the results of the Applied Technology Council (ATC-20) classification of businesses and residences in the two communities. The ATC-20 inspection process results in a building receiving a red tag, yellow tag, or green tag (ATC no date). Redtagged buildings are unsafe for human entry and occupance; yellow-tagged buildings are unsafe for more than limited and supervised entry pending repairs; and green-tagged buildings are safe for routine human entry and occupance, though they may have suffered extensive cosmetic damage. In Ferndale, 69 or 12% of the 595 inspected residences were tagged as unsafe, 14 receiving red tags and 55 yellow tags. In Rio Dell, 251 or 22% of the 1,150 inspected residences were structurally damaged to the point of unsafe, 88 receiving red tags and 163 yellow tags. Similarly, 10% of Ferndale's 49 business establishments were damaged, 2 receiving red tags and 3 getting yellow tags. In Rio Dell, 57% of the community's 54 businesses were damaged: 10 were red-tagged, and 21 were yellow-tagged. The same dollar damages, then, created greater devastation in the poorer community of Rio Dell. Not too surprisingly, Rio Dell experienced a significant displacement of its population: 300 persons, or 10% of the population, had to evacuate to public shelter. There was no such displacement in Ferndale: Those residing in the 69 damaged residences were apparently accommodated by their relatives and friends or were able to secure other living quarters from their own resources and did not wind up in tent cities.

1163

The first hypothesis suggests that media coverage will disproportionately emphasize more privileged communities, in this case, Ferndale. To evaluate media representation of damages in the two communities, photographs of the disaster in local and regional print media were examined (Times-Standard, Union, and The Lumberjack locally, and the San Francisco Chronicle regionally) for one year after the earthquakes and the images of Ferndale and of Rio Dell counted and compared.

To compare reconstruction in the two communities for the third hypothesis, all articles related to the disaster were collected and their content categorized by activities related to Haas, Kates, and Bowden's sequence of post-disaster recovery. The location in which an earthquake coping activity took place was also recorded. The length of these stages was defined by the duration of reported coping activities belonging to each of the phases. The peak of each phase was determined by that point in time in which half of the coping activities belonging to a phase had been completed, the halfway point generally being indicative of the most intense coping activities during that period. Recognizing that media may show systematic biases toward affluent communities, these data were supplemented with field checks on the physical status of recovery conducted in April 1992 and April 1993, during which additional information was derived from informal interviews with city officials, local business owners, and residents in both towns. From these media, field, and interview derived data, timelines of recovery were created for both Rio Dell and Ferndale. The timelines show the time after the event along the X axis, using a logarithmic scale (due to the amount of time involved and the detail required to represent the first couple of weeks), and the three periods of post-event response and recovery are shown

1164

for each community on the Y axis. The intensity of coping activity is shown on as a bar spanning the time each phase was the subject of reportage for each town, shaded to express the intensity of coverage. The peak coverage is shown with the darkest shade. The shading allows the intensity of reported coping activities to be compared between the two communities, no matter the balance of media attention between them. The peaks for each phase can then be compared in terms of relative timing between the more prosperous Ferndale and the poorer Rio Dell as a way of evaluating the equity of the recovery process.

Los Angeles

In the case of the Northridge earthquake, the City of Los Angeles made readily accessible its address-specific ATC-20 building inspection database, which other jurisdictions would not do. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) never released its version of this database compiled from comparable reports done by all affected jurisdictions, despite our repeated requests and their repeated promises. It was, therefore, eventually decided to examine the first hypothesis (i.e., the expectation that media coverage would favor more prosperous communities over less advantaged ones) strictly within the confines of the City of Los Angeles, which would release the data. Since the City contained the lion’s share of the damage, this was not a serious impediment to analysis.

The Building and Safety database lists by address the type of structure (e.g., single-family residence, multiple-family residential structure, or commercial) and the post-earthquake condition of over 90,000 inspected buildings, using the ATC-20 classification of red-tagged,

1165

yellow- tagged, or green-tagged. The database was revised, at first weekly and then at longer and longer intervals, in order to reflect new building inspections, the demolition of red-tagged buildings, and the repair, re-inspection, and green-tagging of yellow-tagged buildings. The database was available for purchase in compressed ASCII format. Four different editions were eventually purchased: 26 April and 12 August 1994, 13 January 1995, and 22 January 1996.

The databases were sorted by Zip postal code and the numbers of red-tagged, yellow-tagged, and green-tagged buildings in each Zip code were tabulated. Zip codes are associated with named communities and districts within the City of Los Angeles. Some of these, mainly in the San Fernando Valley, had been independent towns before annexing themselves to the City of Los Angeles and so the Post Office continues to deliver mail to those areas under their original names (e.g., Northridge, Studio City, and Venice). In the older portions of the City, more nebulous districts have locally-recognized names (e.g., Crenshaw, Fairfax, and Eagle Rock), but the Post Office requires mail to be addressed to the more generic "Los Angeles." In some cases, one place name is attached to one Zip code (e.g., Reseda, Tarzana, and Granada Hills), while larger communities and districts may contain more than one Zip code (e.g., Northridge, South Central, and Hollywood), and still other Zip codes contain two or more locally-recognized communities (e.g., 90012 contains Downtown Los Angeles, Chinatown, and Little Tokyo). Complicating the picture still further, place names are not necessarily stable: Names can be negotiated by petition with the U.S. Postal Service to try to dissociate communities with what they feel are undesirable stereotypes. So, much of Canoga Park is now West Hills, Sepulveda has ceased to exist by being renamed North Hills, west Van Nuys is now Lake Balboa, and South Central is now called South Los Angeles. Within these constraints, Zip codes were aggregated, if necessary, to create a

1166

geography of damaged buildings by place name or vernacular district, generally using older and more established nomenclature.

The geography of damaged buildings in the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety database was then compared with the geography of place name mentions in earthquakerelated front page articles in the first four weeks of the Los Angeles Times and all earthquake related stories in (the much smaller) La Opinión, the leading Spanish language daily newspaper in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. For a community to be included in the analysis, it had to meet the following criteria:

o It had to be within the City of Los Angeles (this excluded such independent municipalities as Beverly Hills, Burbank, San Fernando, Santa Monica, and Santa Clarita) and o It had to have at least 50 damaged buildings or at least 1 mention under whichever variant name in the newspapers (some areas that experienced significant damage were never once reported in the papers, and other communities were mentioned though they had not experienced much building damage)

These criteria yielded 35 communities for further analysis. The two media geographies were then related to the building damage database through simple linear regression. Because it would be unrealistic to expect place name mentions to be somehow perfectly proportional to the number of damaged buildings in a community and because the resulting regression shows great heteroskedasticity, the simple linear regression method was used just for the specific purpose of

1167

identifying grossly overcovered and grossly undercovered communities, that is, communities with large positive and negative residuals from the regression line.

The communities identified in this manner were subjected to further demographic analysis to evaluate possible bias in media coverage. Using the 1990 U.S. Census Summary File Tape 3A, the following attributes were calculated for each community: percentage of the population that was non-Hispanic white and per capita income. These attributes were compared between the undercovered and the overcovered communities to see if the latter were significantly wealthier and significantly less minority-dominated. Significance was assessed through a Z-test of the difference in proportions for the ethnicity variable. Significance is reached, for the purposes of this chapter, with a prob-value of |5.00| was used to differentiate overcovered and undercovered communities from those that received coverage roughly proportionate to their damages. Appendix A provides the correlation and regression statistics for this and other associations discussed in this paper.

*** Table 1 ***

1172

*** Fig. 3 *** Table 2 identifies these overcovered and undercovered communities, together with their 1990 per capita incomes and the percentages of their populations who are non-Hispanic white. The overcovered communities are predominantly non-Hispanic white in ethnicity (63.2%, weighted by population of the communities), while the undercovered communities, by contrast, are minority dominated, with only 20.4% of their populations being non-Hispanic white. With a Z of 444, the difference is highly significant, with a prob-value < 0.0001.

*** Table 2 *** The undercovered communities are, as a group, also markedly poorer, with weighted per capita income of only US$11,996 (1990 dollars), compared with the relatively high incomes of the overcovered communities ($26,314). Unweighted for population, those means would be $11,130 and $23,735, respectively. Randomizing the unweighted per capita incomes from the overcovered and undercovered communities through 10,000 resamples, only 475 resamples yielded differences in mean per capita incomes larger than the $12,497 between the observed unweighted means for the overcovered and the undercovered communities (i.e., estimated probvalue is 0.0475). Figure 4 depicts the distribution of the 10,000 resamples in terms of the differences of the means of the "overcovered" and "undercovered" groups when the community means are randomly allocated to each category. In other words, it is highly unlikely that the marked difference in per capita incomes between overcovered and undercovered communities resulted from sampling error. Figure 5 shows the incomes of the overcovered communities and

1173

the undercovered communities by their ranks, and the significant income bias in the Times' coverage is quite transparent.

*** Fig. 4 ***

*** Fig. 5 *** The Los Angeles Times results for the damage and media association were nearly identical to the results extracted from La Opinión. Table 3 shows the number of damaged buildings by community and the number of place name mentions in La Opinión in all earthquake-related stories appearing in the first four weeks after the disaster. The damages by community do drive much of the variation in La Opinión attention, as seen in the correlation of 0.63: 38% of the variation in La Opinión coverage is accounted for by the spatial variation in actual damages, virtually the same relationship seen in the Los Angeles Times coverage (Appendix A). Indeed, the variation in spatial attention in La Opinión is largely explained by variation in Los Angeles Times coverage , with an r of 0.95 and r2adj of 0.89 (Appendix A), perhaps not surprising in light of the fact that the Los Angeles Times owns 50% of La Opinión. (Moore 2002). Figure 6 shows the association between La Opinión's coverage and that of the L.A. Times as a scatterplot and regression line. Figure 7 shows the same association, but with the Northridge outlier removed. While r and r2adj are significantly different from one another (Z=4.41 and prob 1.75) were 36% Hispanic, while the 5 communities that La Opinión gave less coverage than the Times did were 32% Hispanic (residuals < -1.75). The same 11 communities were identified as overcovered and undercovered using the same residual cutoff standard in both models, with and without Northridge, due to their similarity in slope and intercept. Though minor in magnitude, the difference is, however, significant (Z= 31.7, prob value |2.25| was used to differentiate overcovered and undercovered communities from those that received roughly proportionate coverage.

*** Table 5 ***

1175

*** Fig. 8 ***. Though the particular mix of communities in each category is slightly different than was the case with the Times, overcovered and undercovered communities again diverged in ethnicity and incomes in the same direction as with the Times. Overcovered communities were 55.1% nonHispanic white, while undercovered communities were only 23.2% white, a highly significant difference, with a Z of 383 and a prob-value