Beyond “Emergencies?" Reporting on Humanitarian Issues Around the World
Journal: Digital Journalism
Year: 2025

How do journalists around the world report on humanitarian issues? Two decades after Calhoun first wrote about the “emergency imaginary”, it is still seen as a “master frame”, dominating narratives about humanitarian action in news and aid work alike. But no one has previously tested the extent to which the emergency imaginary dominates journalism about humanitarian issues within a largescale, systematic study. Using an innovative combination of manual and computational approaches, we analyse a