Reporting on Deaths: The Perspective Coverage of Accident News in a German Tabloid

Prescientific experience shows that the news value of a calamitous event happening to one or more persons (e.g. a disease or an accident) depends on two main factors: firstly, on the grade of seriousness or fatality of the event and secondly, on the psychological distance between the persons affected (victims) and those who get the news (recipients). This phenomenon can be observed in interpersonal as well as in mass communication contexts. In the present study the correlation between the geographic distance and the number of victims, on the one hand, and the space allocated to accident news, on the other hand, was analysed in a Munich newspaper. The results show that there was a nearly log-linear relationship between the distance of the fatal event and the average space per death of the accident report.