This article was published in 2017, and has not been updated with the latest news coverage data. Our World in Data presents the empirical evidence on global development in entries dedicated to specific topics. This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entry on Natural Disasters. How many deaths does it take for a natural disaster to be newsworthy? This is a question researchers Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg asked in a 2007 study.1 The two authors found that for every person killed by a volcano, nearly 40,000 people have to die of a food shortage to get the same probability of coverage in US televised news.2 In other words, the type of disaster matters to how newsworthy networks find it to be. The visualizations show the extent of this observed "news effect". The chart shows the proportion of each type of disaster that receives news coverage, and the second shows the "casualties ratio", which tells us—all else equal—how many casualties would make media coverage equally likely for each type of disaster. The study, which primarily set out to examine mass media’s influence on US natural disaster response, considered over 5,000 natural disasters3 and 700,000 news stories from the major US national broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) between 1968 and 2002. The findings tells us, among other important things, that networks tend to be selective in their coverage and attention is not reflecting the severity and number of people killed or affected by a natural disaster. Instead of considering the objective damage caused by natural disasters, networks tend to look for disasters that are “rife with drama”, as one New York Times article put it1—hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, earthquakes all make for splashy headlines and captivating visuals. Thanks to this selectivity, less "spectacular" but often times more deadly natural disasters tend to get passed over. Food shortages, for example, result in the most casualties and affect the most people...