Spectacular City:

News Organizations and Representation of Catastrophe

● Water pressure lost compete b/c fire hydrants were being opened
● Once the heat wave became more deadly, journalistic production shifted their gears and
portrayed the heat wave as a sensational disaster and demanded more attention from
media coverage
○ More and more People were dying, and piles of bodies were piling up on the
streets
○ Hospital were being filled and couldn't take anymore people

News and Disasters

● Events such as the heat wave exacerbate the media’s tensions between informing and
entertaining, explaining and dramatizing
● The heat wave was an accidental news event
○ An unanticipated event (molotch and lester)
■ breaks down social orders, and this prompts social parties to compete in
defining the story and give contradictory accounts
■ Exposes social conditions that aer otherwise unseen
■ Are historical turning points and promote discussion about the social and
political conditions that led or allowed the event
○ In heat wave the key officials were not prepared for the disaster and
■ political officials made contradictory and deceptive claims about it
■ Marginal politicians tried to use it to further their own agendas
■ Political officials tried to impose their analysis as the official record
○ Heat wave was different from most unanticipated events in that
■ The marginal politicians did not have much a voice
■ The incident did not spark public discussion about how the social and
political conditions led to the event; they were quiet
○ News people showed heat wave as a disaster and social spectacle, not a
revelator of emergent concerns of society

What’s News?
● Focus is how journalists contributed to the symbolic construction of the disaster
○ It does analysis on content of major news reports on heat wave
○ Focuses on how news outlets transformed the disaster into a mediated public
event
● Social scientists usually only survey news coverage to assess how journalists represent
issues and events for their audiences, but rarely analyze the conditions in which
reporters and editors produce their accounts
 ○ This only shows that news outlets distorts coverage and omit key issues and info
rather than illustrating how journalists do this
○ This also results in social scientists unifying the media and individual news
companies into one monolithic actor instead of viewing them as a differentiated
set of institutions
● News outlets refract the perspectives and agendas of political officials thru a layerd set
of processes adn reporting techniques
○ Process on p.192
● Exogenous pressure and internal constraints that affected the disaster reporting
○ Newspaper accounts focused on sights, images, adn issues, that made for good
copy, and marginalized others
■ Emphasized: photos of piles of dead bodies, coping strategies of people
during heatwave, natural conditions, use of water to combat heat effects
■ De-emphasized: social conditions that affected impact of disaster
● Articles of how people died alone were put in the back of the
newspapers
● Why and how did the media outlets focus on certain issues and topics: did an analysis
on Chicago Tribune

Discovering Disaster
● They changed from (papajohn) making light of the heat wave and telling Chicagoans to
stop complaining to making the heat wave a serious thing and put articles about it on the
front page, once the mortality rate started going up and more bodies were found at the
morgue due to heat. Heat wave became top priority
● Journalists often mimic, consume, and critique other work from other colleagues
because it is a safe bet and they are often reinforced. But doing this creates a “vicious
info cycle” that affirms the importance of issues that interest of other journalists, but
excludes alternative ideas that could be noteworthy
○ This happens at tribune
● There is homogenized news production b/c the journalists have to compete with each
other
● People had to fight to get their issue the most coverage by vying to get their article on
the front page
○ News paper outlets treated the heat wave as a disaster and gave it coverage;
television did lifestyle and human interest stories because that would get more
views
● The city gov’t criticized the chief medical examiner and questioned whether the death toll
counts were legitimate, they could not believe in one day, so many could die. So the
news outlets, and television, were reluctant to make the heat wave a public event.
Whose News? Official Sources and Journalistic Routines
● This confusion of the validity of the death toll stemmed from news outlets not being able
to have expertise in all the areas they cover and thus having to depend on city
organizations for information
○ They must also treat the info from these organizations as facts and not critique
them b/c that could damage the news outlets relationship with the organization
○ The news outlets did not know where to turn to get infoo about the heat wave,
and had to depend on organizations to make a unified account of the diffused
disaster
● The debate over the deaths became a public event b/c the journalists themselves
were interested in the debate
○ They produced papers that made it seem like the scientific debate over the
validity of the heat death criteria by Donoghue was still going on, but really it was
just journalistic fabrication
■ , a journalists Made it seem like the CDC (specifically semenza) was still
skeptical of the super high death toll; but semenza reported he was not
○ They were also attuned to journalists practices of producing issues and topics
that are dramatic and will get alot of views b/c of competition
■ Their own opinions and debate were the ones promulgating the debate
and confusion over validity, not the scientific communities. And b/c of their
position in society, it had huge effects on the public
○ The journalists and public did not have widespread access to the info that the
scientific community resolved the debate over validity
○ The journalists articles on the confusion and debate were everywhere
○ The news outlets never published the findings of the medical examiner and mire
prominently published their own cynical debates because they were attuned to
journalistic practices of producing issues and topics that are dramatic and will get
alot of views

Alternative Voices and Space for Dissent

● Dissenting views that criticized the city’s response were not taken by primary news
outlets and had to turn to smaller ones
○ The primary voice however promoted that chicagoans were not taking advantage
of the city’s cooling centers; but opposing views that stated there was not alot of
transportation were barely covered
○ Primary voice promoted that chicago was doing a great job
● The slot for dissenting views are usually small or placed at the back of newspapers, so
the dissenting views that criticized the city’s response were not completely expressed
nor as promoted as the primary views
○ This is b/c their views and points were hard to fit into the newsoutlet’s overall
frame: responsible reaction of citizens, rather than neglect of vulnerable citizens
○ Opposing voices are often not quoted, but spoken for by the media\
 ○ The opposing voices expressing how chicago did not do a good job on taking
care of its citizens were only covered in smaller news outlets and didn’t make it
into the public national discussion
● The natural framing of the disaster structured editors’ perception of the heat wave
○ One article that dealt with race and inequality didn’t even cover the heat wave b/c
they thought it was simply about weather

Assigning the Story

● News outlets have a process of assigning the story to a specific type and choose which
story to cover based on
● The news outlets used magazine format of writing about the heatwave which dispatches
the repoorters to the scene of event and interviews and fieldwork, thus distancing the
writers from the actual event. This causes
○ Writers have little time to get a feel for the event
○ Routine and conventional frames become more entrenched because the writers
have their own preconceived notion of the story
○ The writers may rely oon their preconceived notions of the event when they are
skeptical of a first hand report from a reporter on the field

Fast Thinking
● Naturalizing the disaster
○ The reporters have very little time for their field work which
■ limits their ability to critically think about the info.
■ Causes them to resort to conventional frames b/c the amount of time they
have to make sense of the info is limited
● Conventional frame was that given by city officias was that the
heat wave was a natural disaster and not linnked to social
conditions
○ The reporters’ job during the heatwave is to storytell b/c they did not see the
heatwave as a scientific matter. The reporters often slip from storytelling to
expository/explanation without prefacing to readers that their conclusions are
provisional or incomplete
■ They said that the cause of heat wave was naturalistic, but failed to
include social connditons too.
○ They newsoutlets have deep solid reporting and field work, but thin speculative
explanations adn analysis that are rushed adn not based on any solid
reasoniinng
■ They claimed those who died were not lonely or did not die alone, but
they did not do the sufficient research and analyses to justify them
making these claims
○ Their rushed and hurried time line does not allow for them to do the analyses adn
research that allows them to make such general interpretations. But they make
 these interpretations anyways b/c that’s what the audience expects of them and
that’s what gets views

Headines adn visual images

● The people who write the articles and gather the data are not the people who write the
headlines
○ People use headlines to capture their attention and determine what’s important
○ Sometimes the headlines contradict what the article says and are just wrong, just
so they can broaden the appeal of the newspaper.
■ The headline stated the victims were just like us, but the article says that
the victims were the poor, elderly ,or social outcasts
○ Editors can compromise the accuracy of headline if they get more people to buy
b/c of marketing research
● Because the heat wave is not very visual, this challenged news outlets to figure out how
they will use pics for the story
○ Some journalists had to compromise the amount of time spent on conventional
reporting in order to focus on photos and visual aspects of the news

Stories, Images, and News Placement

● The photos with an article often dictate what stories will be on the front page and
whether an article will even make it into the newspaper
● The sensationalizing photos of dead bodes did not really help audiences understand the
connections between the social and political conditions of the city and the public health
crisis

Fragmentation of Audiences

It targeted its audiences by eliminating, editing, excerpting, or repositioning certain heat wave coverage
for their ethnoracially or regionally different readers and by changing the graphics and photographs so
that the paper’s visual images resonated with particular readers who wanted news about people like
them.