Imaginando un desastre

El huracán Stan en la prensa

Abstract

Mass media communication affects the way in which the audience, in general terms, interprets the world that surrounds us. In this research, the information that the press published about the disaster detonated by the hurricane Stan (2005) in the east and southeast of Mexico is analyzed. Seven newspapers and one magazine that covered the hurricane between the 5th to the 10th of October 2005 were analyzed. A number of similarities in the way the information was presented and interpreted were found. Among them, the emotive messages that appeal to the public’s sentimentalism, and the propagation of social representations of hurricanes that existed since prehispanic times. It was also found that most of the news interpret the disaster based on a scientific paradigm that is losing validity in academic circles.