Their floods and Our floods: News values of flood photo galleries of Associated Press and Xinhua News Agency

Negativity, Impact and Superlativeness

Negativity is the second most prominent news value following Timeliness in presenting Their floods. In the photo galleries of both AP and Xinhua, Negativity is mainly related to flooding as a natural disaster. It is established verbally through words such as ‘downpour’, ‘rainfall’ and ‘flood’ in the captions, and visually through images of floodwater, mud, garbage, etc. There is only one photo showing negative emotion.

Negativity usually co-occurs with Impact, which is also a prominent news value in the photo galleries of Their floods. Images of destruction, such as flooded roads, submerged cars, fallen trees and damaged houses, are frequently shown in the photos.

Closely related to the impact of the flood is Superlativeness. It is constructed in the caption by describing the severity of the flood, the loss of lives and economic impact. In the photo, Superlativeness is established by showing large volumes of floodwater, or a number of houses inundated. Superlativeness of Their floods is construed more often in the captions than in the photos. Around seven out of ten photo-caption complexes have Superlativeness construed through captions.

Personalization, Eliteness and Consonance

Theoretically speaking, Personalization is constructed either when ordinary people are mentioned in the captions or when they are shown in the photos. In our data, visual presentations and verbal references tend to accompany each other. That is to say, when a photo shows a person, the person is often also identified in the caption, where description of her/his action is provided.

Most of the ordinary people presented in the photos of Their floods are flood victims. Although analysed as embodying ‘Personalization’, a large number of photos use medium to long shot, whereby images of people are taken from a distance, and it is hard to see them clearly. Meanwhile, people also tend to appear in large groups, and they are often presented in an oblique angle or from behind. Consequently, there is usually no eye contact between the person(s) in the photo and the reader. The result is that although people from other countries are shown, they are clearly presented as ‘Others’ most of the time. Similarly, although they are often referred to in the accompanying captions, the most frequently used words are generic references such as ‘a man’, ‘a woman’, ‘people’ and ‘children’. No further information is provided. These could only be considered a ‘very weak’ kind of personalization (Bednarek, 2016).

Eliteness is constructed when elite people or institutions are referred to in the caption or shown in the photo. Both ways are used in AP’s photo galleries of Their floods, with slightly more visual presentations than verbal references. In contrast, there are only three cases where Elitenss is constructed visually in the data of Xinhua. The rest of the data construct Eliteness verbally in the captions, mainly through references to elite sources of the news information such as ‘the spokesman of the government’.

Although Consonance takes up the same percentage in the data of both AP and Xinhua, this news value is constructed in different ways. In the photo galleries of AP, Consonance is established through verbal resources in the captions that refer to the expectedness of the floods, as is shown in the flowing examples.

(1) Every year, Sudan experiences floods… (AP)

By contrast, such expressions are not found in the captions of Xinhua, where Consonance is almost always constructed in the photos through visual stereotypes. For instance, in photos showing floods in countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Somalia, there are female figures wearing traditional Muslim clothing, especially hijab. In the photos of flood in Afghanistan, people are shown wearing Perahan Tunban, a type of traditional Afghan dress (cf. Figure 1). These are considered stereotypical since there are personalized photos of the same event where no such features are foregrounded.

Proximity

Significant differences are found in the news values of Proximity and Positivity in the presentations of Their floods by AP and Xinhua. Proximity is generally established through references to familiar places in the captions, and it is much more prominent in the photo galleries of Xinhua (68%) than in those of AP (27%). Table 3 presents the countries that are covered in the data of AP and Xinhua, with those geographically or culturally close to the target readers italicized.

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Table 3.

Countries covered in the photo galleries of AP and Xinhua.

	AP		Xinhua
—	Country	No. of photos	Country	No. of photos
1	Bangladesh	16	Afghanistan	15
2	Brazil	10	Angola	2
3	China	9	Australia	6
4	Cuba	3	Bangladesh	8
5	France	50	Cambodia	12
6	Germany	19	India	4
7	Greece	12	Indonesia	54
8	Guatemala	3	Iraq	4
9	Honduras	52	Nepal	3
10	India	6	New Zealand	4
11	Indonesia	67	Pakistan	10
12	Japan	39	Philippines	11
13	Lagos	8	Somalia	6
14	Mexico	71	South Korea	7
15	Nicaragua	3	Sri Lanka	3
16	North Korea	4	Sudan	6
17	Palestine	15	Thailand	7
18	Philippines	153	Turkey	6
19	Russia	17	U.K.	9
20	Sudan	11	U.S.	3
21	U.K.	5	Yemen	17
Proximity		157/573		134/197

Table 3 shows that 11 out of the 21 countries covered in Xinhua are geographically or culturally close to China, whereas five countries are recognized as such to the US. Part of the reason might be the location of China in Asia, where the majority of the world’s floods occur each year. In contrast, the US is far away from countries such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines, which tend to appear in news coverage of international floods. Meanwhile, Table 3 also shows that there is a tendency to report on countries that are familiar to the target readers by both news agencies. Four out of the five countries that are close to the US and covered by AP (France, Germany, Greece and Mexico), are not covered by Xinhua.

Positivity

Positivity is constructed in more than half (59%) of AP’s presentation of Their floods. This is contrary to previous findings that other countries tend to be represented in a negative manner by the US media (Langton 1991; Greenwood and Smith 2007; Kim and Smith 2005). In comparison, Positivity only appears in 20% of Xinhua’s presentation of Their floods. To better understand the ways Positivity is constructed, we retrieved all the photo-caption complexes and made further categorizations according to whether positive emotions, actions or entities are presented.

Table 4 shows that both AP and Xinhua tend to highlight positive actions over positive emotions and flood control structures. While AP gives more prominence to the rescue actions of soldiers, policemen and firefighters, Xinhua tends to highlight the self-rescue actions of flood victims.

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Table 4.

Positivity in the photo galleries of Their floods.

Positivity type		AP	Xinhua
Positive emotions	—	3 (1%)	3 (1%)
Positive actions	—	330 (57%)	35 (18%)
—	Self-rescue actions	102 (17%)	27 (14%)
—	Rescue actions by soldiers, police, firefighters, etc.	228 (40%)	8 (4%)
Flood control structures	—	7 (1%)	2 (1%)
Total	—	340 (59%)	40 (20%)

A further investigation into the positive actions presented in AP’s photo galleries shows that they are mainly found in the presentation of floods in some countries: the Philippines, Honduras, Japan, Mexico, France and Indonesia, rather than evenly distributed across the data. For France, Japan and Mexico, positive actions of ordinary people as well as professional rescuers are presented in both the photos and the captions. For the Philippines, Honduras and Indonesia, quite often the governmental rescue operation is mentioned in the captions only, without corresponding images in the photos. In all cases where positive actions are identified, repetition is a notable feature. According to Caple and Knox (2015), photos can be considered repetitive when two or more shots of the same event, actor or scene appear, and captions are repetitive when sentences repeat across different captions. In our data, for instance, there is such a sentence in the captions to flood photos of Philippines.

(3) …A typhoon swelled rivers and flooded low-lying areas … northeast Philippines, where rescuers were deployed early Thursday to help people flee the rising waters. (AP)

We analysed this sentence as construing Positivity, as it refers to the positive action of rescuers helping people to flee. This sentence is repeated in 69 captions, and most of the accompanying photos do not show the rescue activity. Instead, there are only images of flooded villages, stranded people or destroyed houses. Moreover, some photos showing positive actions are also repetitive: they are images of the same group of rescuers taken from different angles and shot sizes. For instance, in the two photo galleries about the searching operations in Japan, the same actions are repeatedly shown. Therefore, it can be said that due to the verbal and visual repetition, Positivity might not be as significant as the statistics indicate. Repetition of Eliteness also occurs when the rescuers are professionals, but repetition is not found in the construal of other news values.

Negativity, Consonance and Eliteness

Negativity is the most prominent news value apart from Proximity and Timeliness in the presentation of domestic floods by both AP and Xinhua. No negative emotions are shown, and Negativity is mainly construed through visual images of and verbal references to floodwater. In AP’s photo galleries of floods in the US, Negativity tends to co-occur with Impact to show the consequences of the flooding, but such co-occurrences are not common in Xinhua’s presentation of floods in China.

Consonance and Eliteness are minor news values in the presentation of Our floods. In the data of Xinhua, Consonance is mainly constructed through images of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the People’s Armed Police (PAP) engaged in disaster relief, though there are occasionally verbal expressions such as ‘encountered flood again’ to indicate the recurring nature of flood in Southern China. The same is observed in AP where images of firefighters and policemen are seen in the photos.

Images of the PLA and PAP in Xinhua, and images of firefighters and policemen in AP also indicate Eliteness. In both Xinhua and AP, there are visual presentations of governmental officials and verbal references to governmental institutions, which explains why there are more instances of Eliteness than Consonance. For instance, Xinhua has a photo gallery showcasing the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit of flood-affected residents, where Eliteness is highlighted.

Personalization

Although AP and Xinhua are statistically similar in Personalization (50% and 51%) in their presentation of domestic floods, they differ in the identities of people shown in the photos and the amount of information provided in the captions. Firstly, almost all the personalized photos of AP show images of flood victims. In comparison, photos of victims make up only around one fifth of the personalized photos of Xinhua, which give more prominence to people who are ordinary, but who make a contribution to flood control. These include volunteers, grassroots flood rescuers and locals who voluntarily patrol the dike and safeguard their villages. This results in the clustering of Personalization with Positivity in Xinhua’s presentation of floods in China, as the people shown are usually engaged in positive actions. In contrast, AP tends to show a clustering of Personalization with Negativity in presenting domestic floods, since people are usually seen wading through the floodwater or investigating the damage to their property.

Secondly, the people are introduced in different ways in the captions. In the data of AP, nearly half of the people in the photos are named and/or provided with personal information such as age, occupation and relationship with each other. This is illustrated in the following example.

(4) Siblings, from left, Lily Wall, 10, Alena, 7, and John, 3, create make-believe ‘soup’ in their front yard on a dreary Thursday afternoon, Sept. 17, 2020, in Raleigh, N.C… (AP)

Such detailed information of the individuals constitutes ‘strong’ Personalization (Bednarek 2016). Fewer than one quarter of the personalized photos by Xinhua have captions that name the people in the photos. Often they are collectively referred to as ‘children, ‘villagers’ or simply ‘people’. Therefore, while half of AP’s instances of Personalization belong to ‘strong’ Personalization, more than three quarters of instances of Personalization in the data of Xinhua are ‘weak’ personalization.

Superlativeness

Superlativeness is construed in only 16% of the photo-caption complexes of AP, indicating that most of the time, domestic floods are presented as less severe than international floods (42%). Superlativeness is usually construed by showing large volumes of water in photos taken through wide-angle lens or drone photography. Floodwater takes the central position in establishing Superlativeness.

The same tendency is observed in the data of Xinhua, where zoom lens is also used to focus on the wave-like raging torrents. It is interesting to note that while Superlativeness tends to co-occur with Impact in the data of AP, such tendency is not found in the photo galleries of Xinhua. In fact, about half of the photos by Xinhua indicating Superlativeness show no impact: they show large amounts of floodwater running through the dams or rivers but causing no damage.

Impact

Although both AP and Xinhua present domestic floods as negative, they differ significantly in presenting the impact of the floods. Impact is constructed in 64% of the photo galleries in AP, whereas the figure is only 28% for Xinhua. AP construes Impact through visual presentations of stranded cars, flooded roads, lawns and damaged houses and boats, etc. Similar images of destroyed fields, roads and bridges, and flooded districts are seen in the photos of Xinhua, but they are quantitatively less significant in the whole dataset. Also, there are cases in Xinhua where Impact is constructed in the caption only, with no corresponding visual presentation. For instance, a caption reads as follows.

(5) Villagers have a meal at a temporary shelter for evacuated residents in Qiashe Township ... Heavy rainfall hit the Huizhou District of Huangshan City, leaving several villages inundated in varying degrees. The local authorities rapidly organized flood response efforts to evacuate affected residents, rehabilitate destroyed roads and dredge silt-clogged ditches. (Xinhua)

Impact is construed in the second sentence of the caption (leaving several villages inundated). But what is visually shown in the photo corresponds to the first sentence, that is, several villagers having a meal at a temporary shelter (Personalization). The fact that the third sentence turns to highlight Eliteness (local authorities) and Positivity (to evacuate affected residents, rehabilitate destroyed roads and dredge silt-clogged ditches) renders the news value of Impact even less noticeable.

Positivity

Figure 3 shows that Positivity is more significant in the photo galleries of Xinhua (65%) than in those of AP (25%) in their presentations of domestic floods. The composition of Positivity in the datasets is presented in Table 5.

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Table 5.

Positivity in the photo galleries of Our floods.

Positivity type		AP	Xinhua
Positive emotions	—	4 (2%)	12 (2%)
Positive actions	—	44 (19%)	225 (47%)
—	Self-rescue actions	21 (9%)	52 (11%)
—	Rescue actions by soldiers, police, workers, volunteers, etc.	23 (10%)	173 (36%)
Flood control structures	—	9 (4%)	81 (16%)
Total	—	57 (25%)	318 (65%)

Table 5 shows that 19% of the photo-caption complexes of AP present positive actions, where flood victims’ self-rescue actions (9%) are as important as the rescuing operations of firefighters and policemen (10%). In comparison, 47% of the photo-caption complexes of Xinhua present positive actions, with more emphasis on the rescue actions by army soldiers and volunteers (36%) than the flood victims’ self-rescue actions (11%). Moreover, the percentage of photos showing advanced flood control structures in Xinhua (16%) is four times that in AP (4%).

While AP’s presentations of positive actions are scattered across the dataset, Xinhua tends to organize the photos into photo galleries with titles highlighting Positivity. There are titles such as ‘Rescuers rush to repair roads destroyed by flood’ and ‘Armed police troops join flood control operations’. The photos in these photo galleries show armed soldiers and policemen engaged in positive actions of patrolling and fixing dikes, repairing damaged roads and taking care of the evacuated residents. Ordinary people such as villagers, volunteers and workers also appear frequently. According to Cottle (2008), ordinary people are often afforded news presence to be allocated moral roles in the news media’s ‘preferred personae dramatis and scripts of mediated disasters’ (54). For instance, a photo gallery entitled ‘Woman volunteers take part in fight against flood in Jiangxi’ showcases a voluntary group of elderly women. They cook and serve mung bean soup for the armed policemen, illustrating the Chinese people’s gratitude towards the soldiers (and the government).

Apart from showcasing positive actions, Xinhua also tends to highlight China’s efficient flood control structures, such as reservoirs, dams and levees. The most prominent is the Three Gorges Reservoir, which appears in about 50 photos. These photos are taken by using techniques such as drone photography, wide-angle lens, fast speed and focus, and the lighting is carefully adjusted. The results are photos highlighting the news value of Negativity (floodwater), Superlativeness (the massiveness of the construction or the large volumes of floodwater), Aesthetic appeal (the visual attractiveness of the photos) and Positivity (the reservoir helps to control floodwater) (e.g. Xinhua 2020).