Mass media and natural disaster: flood in Malaysia

Mass media serve as a source of information for the public and could influence people's attitudes, health, and, most importantly, way of thinking. It covers a wide range of topics including the current news in Malaysia, flood disaster. Flood disaster is a normal occurrence in a few states of Malaysia that results from natural phenomena. However, December 2021 marked the start of sudden floods in certain areas such as Selangor which is not prone to such disaster. It is believed that there are a lot of factors for the occurrence. Furthermore, the climate change crisis is also on the rising today as a lot of climate scientists start to take direct action to increase people's awareness of the apparent impact. Therefore, this research was conducted to explore the mass media’s discussion and perception on floods in Malaysia and indirectly look into the discussion of climate change. This research used qualitative content analysis to achieve the objectives. The news articles by Malaysiakini with ‘banjir’ as the keyword within the period of 16th December 2021 until 22nd April 2022 were analysed to come up with the categories of topics discussed by the media. The result established that the media report factual information about the current situations with topics ranging from the occurrences of flood to politics. Climate change is also reported along in terms of the awareness, actions, occurrence of climate change, causes of climate change and its relationship with a flood.