A Multilingual Media Analysis of Pediatric and Thyroid-Related Newspaper Communications Following the Chernobyl and Fukushima Nuclear Disasters

Abstract

Public media communication, particularly through newspapers, plays a critical role in shaping public awareness, governmental response, and remediation efforts following large-scale crises, including nuclear power plant accidents. Because children are biologically more vulnerable to the effects of ionizing radiation, understanding how media narratives include children following nuclear events is especially important. This study employed a novel multilingual computational approach to analyze newspaper coverage following the Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011) accidents in Russian and Japanese. Using structural topic modeling (STM), we examined dominant themes related to children, nuclear events, and thyroid-related health concerns across both contexts. The analysis identified four topics in the Russian-language newspaper and six topics in the Japanese newspaper. Themes in the Russian-language newspaper focused more on the geographical environment, affected populations, and disease, while the Japanese newspaper emphasized health management, surveys, peace education, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, radiation, and Chernobyl, showcasing specific cultural emphasis in media reporting. Coverage of the later accident drew explicitly on the earlier one, whereas no comparable precedent was available at the time of Chernobyl, indicating an asymmetry in the information environment available to support protective action. Although the small and uneven corpus limits generalizability, the study demonstrates the exploratory value of multilingual STM for comparing nuclear-disaster reporting across languages and historical contexts.