May 22 - July 31
Gender and Journalistic Place-Making in Televised Tornado Coverage
Scout Key, Victoria Johnson, and Darren Purcell
What is already known:
- Broadcast meteorologists, as journalists, are active place-makers who play an important role in shaping the significance of the communities they report on, rather than being neutral observers of the communities themselves.
- Broadcast meteorologists provide disproportionate levels of severe weather coverage based on their personal and subjective interpretations of place, which are tied to urban and rural dynamics.
What this study adds:
- Journalistic "place-making" explains what broadcast meteorologists define as severe weather risk, how it should be communicated, and to whom, giving them the power to shape public perceptions of severe weather and the communities they impact.
- Gender biases influence the extent to which broadcast meteorologists prioritize and frame severe weather risks, shaping which communities receive more or less attention and how the public perceives the significance and impact of storms for these places.
Abstract:
Place-making is a concept used to understand and describe how meaningful places emerge from interactions between people and their environments. In journalism, this refers to a journalists’ ability to create and convey a sense of place through their reporting to foster connections between audiences and the locations and contexts of their stories. This paper presents a first attempt at identifying gender-sensitive journalistic place-making processes in the provision of weather news, particularly in connection to broadcast meteorologists’ coverage of the 2-3 March 2020 tornado outbreak in Nashville, Tennessee. A qualitative content analysis (QCA) is pursued to isolate the effects of gender on WSMV’s local television coverage of the outbreak. Preliminary findings indicate that journalistic place-making varied by gender of the meteorologist: female meteorologists tend to foster a sense of place by emphasizing broad-level information, such as appropriate protective actions at the city/county scale, whereas male meteorologists offer more detailed, street-level reports to enhance the audience’s understanding of a storm’s path and potential risk to specific areas. Our results suggest that broadcast meteorologists are not merely reporters but are active place-makers who help construct and convey the significance of severe weather in relation to the places where people live. These findings open the door to further explorations of how gender nuances in the place-making process shape media coverage and the costs associated with meteorologists’ gender on the representation of places.