Cautionary Tales: Social Representation of Risk in U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Cyberbullying Exemplars

Abstract

The goal of this mixed-methods study is to investigate how the stories of victims represent the risk of cyberbullying in more than a decade’s worth of U. S. news stories. Exemplars were common, appearing in almost half of 622 news stories from more than 70 U. S. newspapers. Further, exemplars experiencing extreme outcomes, specifically suicide, were predominant, and exemplars who had died by suicide were also defined by their differences, a pattern recognized in the social representation of risk framework as a form of symbolic coping. In focusing on how news coverage constructs the new risk of cyberbullying through stories of exemplars, we show how the representation of a social issue coalesces around particular outcomes, risk factors, and prototypical victims.