Mediatised risk culture: News coverage of risk technologies

Abstract

In this article, we examine if and how a particular risk culture emerges as mediated and mediatised for a number of diverse technological risks. Modern news reporting is increasingly preoccupied with representing risk events in order to show how technological lifestyles affect our human and natural environments. In this article, we draw on data from project which used a comparative research design to investigate media coverage of four contemporary risks, in order to show how public risk communication contributes to the establishment of a broader mediatised risk culture. The project combined a quantitative content analysis with a qualitative study of a sample (n = 344) of news items across three different Danish media platform. We found that risk reporting varied substantially depending on dominant news themes, cultural resonance and media platform. However, within these variations we also found common elements such as the discursive representations of risk as contested and/or manageable. Based on the aggregate picture of the four risk studied, we argue that the media risk discourse takes a particular form that is different to risk discourse in other social arenas. Media risk discourse, therefore, tends to share certain cultural traits which results in the representation of risks as either (un-)manageable or (un-)controllable according to the level of public or elite disagreement in public debate.