“Natural disasters don’t kill people, governments kill people:” hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico–recreancy, and ‘risk society’

On September 20, 2017, Maria, the eleventh-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, made landfall at 6:15 am local time, the second category 5 hurricane to strike the island in as many weeks. What followed was one of the most challenging recovery situations since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. Using 402 newspaper articles from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I performed a deductive and inductive analysis of print news media frames to demonstrate the complex ways in which the discourse and actions of key social agents and institutions shape disaster risk for the archipelago before, during, and after Maria. Findings suggest media framing facilitated a lack of accountability for key institutions obliged to provide response and recovery. Key powerful actors, including President Donald Trump, shifted blame for the disaster from FEMA and other key institutions to Puerto Rico, effectively protecting the legitimacy of the Trump administration and its response in Puerto Rico. I argue that these processes are owed to economic factors. Here, Beck’s concept of an institutionally dependent “industrial society” is reconstituted in economically vital urban centers. In contrast, the failure of key institutions causes rural spaces to abandon them. This individualization of risk marks what Beck refers to as the emergence into a “risk society.” This article offers important implications for the study of media as a key site for the selective preservation of institutional legitimacy during disasters and the particular and contingent development of a risk society.