Touch in Disaster Reporting: Television Coverage before Hurricane Maria

Abstract

This study examines the use of interpersonal touch by television reporters in their interactions with sources — mainly residents and government officials — before Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. We used a qualitative approach, which allowed four functions to emerge inductively but aligned with concepts from haptics and journalistic roles research. The functions — engagement and participation, empathy and caring, easing tension, and collective empowerment are described in relation to the literature on touch across cultures. Implications for the emotional turn in journalism are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.