Portraying Animals in Disasters: news media representations of the Portuguese wildfires of 2017

This article explores how news media report and construct the situation of animals in disasters, drawing on a specific case study: the tragic wildfires that hit Portugal in 2017. It explores to what extent animals are present in the narration of the wildfires, and how they are included in these narratives, indirectly participating in the communication of disasters. Drawing on thematic content analysis of animal-related content published in Portuguese newspapers and primetime television news, we examined, through multivariate Multiple Component Analysis, followed by Cluster analysis, whether the resulting thematic macro-categories clustered around narrative topoi. We propose four portrays of media narratives about animals in wildfires, which highlight their entangled lives with humans: risk, emergency and rescue; emotional relationship and vulnerability; economic relationship and loss; and political and economic (lack of) support. We explore whether these four discursive spaces reinforce or challenge a human-centred approach to disasters’ representation. We argue that insofar as the news value attributed to animals is linked to human experience, as economic or emotional loss, it concurs to erase animals as subjects with interests and lives of their own from the media agenda. We further argue that such type of visibility of animals paradoxically relates to the invisibility of the structural conditions that ultimately contribute to the vulnerability of both humans and nonhumans to disasters. The article ends with reflections and recommendations on how to develop compassionate forms of journalism and media communication towards other species.