Beyond “Emergencies?" Reporting on Humanitarian Issues Around the World

How do journalists around the world report on humanitarian issues? Two decades after Calhoun first wrote about the “emergency imaginary”, it is still seen as a “master frame”, dominating narratives about humanitarian action in news and aid work alike. But no one has previously tested the extent to which the emergency imaginary dominates journalism about humanitarian issues within a largescale, systematic study. Using an innovative combination of manual and computational approaches, we analyse a global corpus of over a million media texts, disseminated between 2010–2020. This specially constructed dataset included 582 sources of broadcast, print and online media in 92 countries. We found that the emergency imaginary did dominate reporting in most Anglophone countries. But it did not seem to dominate the coverage of humanitarian issues world-wide. Instead, journalism elsewhere tended to use hybrid interpretative frames: blending aspects of the emergency imaginary with other kinds of discourse. However, in most of the countries we analysed, online journalism had a closer relationship to the emergency imaginary than non-digital content. Based on an analysis of document similarity, we suggest that this may be influenced by their dependence on copy from three wire agencies, Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Thomson Reuters.