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

SUBMITTER: Bryce C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12396942 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature