City Research Online

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 fourteen 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.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Risk Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Risk Analysis. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	media; risk communication; social amplification of risk; topic modeling
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Actuarial Science & Insurance
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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