How many deaths does it take for a disaster to receive news coverage?

Disaster occurrence and news coverage data is used to compute the casualties ratio. The casualties ratio indicates how many casualties would make media coverage(in major US networks) equally likely, all else equal.

Food shortage38,920Cold wave3,150Drought2,395Epidemic1,696Landslide882Flood674Storm280Fire12Earthquake2Volcano1

Source: Eisensee and Strömberg (2007)

Note: This data is controlled for several factors, including the number killed and affected, country, year, and month. This is important because it takes into account, for instance, cyclical variations in newspressure (i.e. there is an observed early summer news drought in May and June).