Getting inside the story: How framing, empathy in news coverage affect historical relevance

Narratives have a special power to facilitate information recall by transporting a reader into the story and creating an empathic connection to the characters there. Whether that connection is emotional or mental, the reader may be forever changed by what they experience inside the story. When such a story is shared with a large audience, it can create change on a larger scale, affecting even how an entire society remembers that narrative. This study examined media portrayals of the Johnstown flood of 1889 within the week after the event and within the week of its first, 25th, 50th, and 100th anniversaries to see how the story was told and what effect that storytelling had on the event’s historical persistence. I determined that there was a transition in the storylines emphasized in coverage, that empathic language and narrativity declined over time despite an increase in descriptive writing, and that later coverage differed substantially from coverage within the first 25 years.