In a Crisis

On the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia. The resulting explosion killed nearly two thousand people and flattened the north end of the city. It was the largest human-made explosion before the nuclear age.

Within hours, survivors were pulling strangers from rubble, improvising hospitals in churches and railway stations, and sharing food with people they had never met. The next day a blizzard arrived. Residents of Truro, two hours away by train, loaded relief supplies and medical teams before anyone had formally organized them. People came from across eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, not because anyone had issued orders, but because other people needed help.

This is not the story most people expect. The version of human nature embedded in popular culture and reproduced in disaster media coverage is that when things fall apart, so do people. Civilization is a thin crust over barbarity: scratch the surface and you get looting, assault, and the strong preying on the weak. This story is wrong in almost every particular, but it keeps being told because it serves purposes that have nothing to do with accuracy.

The sociologist E.L. Quarantelli spent decades studying disasters and came to a conclusion that surprised many people: panic and antisocial behavior are the exception, not the rule. Communities typically show increases in prosocial behavior: strangers help each other, crime rates generally fall, and people who were barely acquaintances briefly become something like a community.

Rebecca Solnit documented this pattern across a century of catastrophes. Her case studies, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the September 11 attacks in New York, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, illustrate Qurantelli’s findings. Disastsers reveal a capacity for mutual aid that is usually suppressed by the atomization of modern consumer society. When the disaster removes the usual structures, something else emerges in their place.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan offered a particularly clear example. International journalists, primed by narratives of disaster chaos, arrived to find orderly queues at relief stations, neighbors sharing food, and almost no reports of looting. The response was widely attributed to cultural exceptionalism, but Japan was not exceptional. The media’s “Mad Max” narrative was just wrong.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 produced the most extensively documented divergence between media narrative and documented reality in modern history. In the days after the storm major news organizations reported roving gangs in the Superdome, mass rape, a baby with its throat cut, and snipers firing at rescue helicopters. The Governor of Louisiana reported that hooligans were murdering and raping. The New Orleans police chief described shooting looters on sight. Federal officials cited the breakdown of civil order as a reason to delay humanitarian response.

Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski systematically reviewed the media coverage and the subsequent investigations in 2006. Their findings were stark: the reported gang violence in the Superdome did not happen, the murder rate in the city did not spike, most of the “looting” was people taking food and water to survive. The sniper attacks on helicopters were fabricated, as was the story about the baby.

But these lies had consequences. Hospitals delayed evacuating critically ill patients while waiting for military escorts that would protect them from the violence that was not occurring. Trucks carrying food and water were turned back from routes that were deemed dangerous when in fact they weren’t. A group of survivors trying to walk across the Crescent City Connection bridge to reach Gretna, where they had been told buses were waiting, were turned back at gunpoint by police from Gretna who said they were keeping their community safe. The fiction of social breakdown caused deaths that the storm itself had not.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti produced a version of the same story. International media coverage focused obsessively on looting and gang violence, and security was framed as the precondition for humanitarian response. Researchers who studied the actual distribution of behavior found the same pattern as in every other disaster: most people were helping each other, and the image of Haitian social collapse reflected the assumptions of reporters and officials more than the behavior of Haitian people.

Solnit has a name for what happened in New Orleans: elite panic. Ordinary people in a disaster tend to behave with remarkable generosity and calm, but authorities and elites tend to panic—not about the disaster, but about the public. They fear that the masses will revert to savagery, so they militarize relief operations and shoot people for taking food. Since they believe that the social order that keeps them on top is only held together by the threat of force, then a disaster that removes their ability to enforce their rules looks like the end of civilization. The evidence that people mostly cooperate without being told to threatens this worldview, which is perhaps one reason it has so little effect on official disaster planning.

The gap between what happens in disasters and what gets reported is also explained by what counts as news. Editors make decisions about what to show based on what will attract attention, and dramatic conflict attracts more attention than organized mutual aid. The result is systematic selection bias in disaster coverage—not fabrication per se, but a consistent filtering that makes antisocial behavior visible and prosocial behavior invisible.

There is also the structure of official sources. Reporters under deadline, in chaotic conditions, rely heavily on officials for information. Officials, for reasons Solnit’s elite panic theory helps explain, tend to describe situations as more dangerous than they are. The governor who says “there are hooligans murdering people” gets quoted. The disaster sociologist who reports normal altruistic behavior is less quotable.

The disaster myth has one other important consequence. If the media consistently describes human nature as more violent and more selfish than it actually is, people are pre-conditioned to believe that cooperation is unlikely, which makes them less likely to cooperate. Just as advertising can manufacture demand, biased reporting can manufacture mistrust, and in doing so, hurt us all.

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Quarantelli1998

E.L. Quarantelli (ed.): What Is a Disaster?: A Dozen Perspectives on the Question. Routledge, 1998, 9780415178990.

Solnit2009

Rebecca Solnit: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking, 2009, 9780670021079.

Tierney2006

Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski: “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 604, 2006, 10.1177/0002716205285589.