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

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.