Media amplification under the floodlight: Contextualizing 20 years of US risk news

Cormac Bryce, Michael Dowling, Suwan Cheng Long and Jamie Wardman
Additional contact information
Cormac Bryce: St George's, University of London
Michael Dowling: DCU - Dublin City University [Dublin]
Suwan Cheng Long: LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - ULCO - Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Jamie Wardman: University of Leicester

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper addresses the question of identifying and distinguishing risk amplification incidents and patterns in the news media. To meet this objective, our study incorporates a novel "floodlight" approach utilizing the Society for Risk Analysis Glossary in conjunction with topic modeling and time‐series analysis, to investigate risk‐focused stories within a corpus of 271,854 US news articles over the past two decades. We find that risk amplification in the US news media is concentrated around seven core risk news categories—business, domestic affairs, entertainment, environment, geopolitics, health, and technology—which also vary in the risk‐related terms that they predominantly employ. We also identify 14 signal events that can be distinguished relative to general risk news within their categories. Across these events, the "War on Terror" and COVID‐19 are seen to display uniquely dynamic media reporting patterns, including a systemic influence between risk news categories and the attenuation of other risk news. We discuss possible explanations for these findings along with their wider research and policy implications.

Keywords: media; risk communication; social amplification of risk; topic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Risk Analysis, 2025, 45 (7), pp.1940-1956. ⟨10.1111/risa.17701⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05371092

DOI: 10.1111/risa.17701

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().