Weibo and Inequality in Disaster Coverage

The disasters today have the characters of uncertainty and inequality. This article focuses on the two big earthquakes happened in the last five years in Sichuan province, China. It explores the way to reduce the inequality in disaster coverage by researching the changes of the form of news report.

In the disaster coverage, especially in the early stage, the traditional media tends to draw close attentions on basic information in key areas, ignoring the remote areas inevitably. The new media, especially SNS, with its group advantage, becomes another important force in the disaster news report. In Sichuan Lushan earthquake in May,2013, the traditional media started to use its weibo account which formed a new mode of news report. This is different with their works in the Wenchuan earthquake five years ago. By interviewing 15 journalists who participated in reporting the Wenchuan and Lushan earthquake, this article finds out the discrepancy in using the traditional media and new media. It also elaborates that a new form of inequality emerged due to the digital divide, while weibo is eliminating traditional inequality.

(Weibo is a SNS like Twitter)