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. 2025 Jul;45(7):1940-1956.
doi: 10.1111/risa.17701. Epub 2025 Feb 5.

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

Cormac Bryce  1 , Michael Dowling  2 , Suwan Cheng Long  3 , Jamie K Wardman  4
Affiliations

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

Cormac Bryce et al. Risk Anal. 2025 Jul.

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.

Keywords: media; risk communication; social amplification of risk; topic modeling.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Distribution of risk category coverage in US media over time. Top figure: news article count per year. Bottom figure: news article count per year normalized by total articles per year.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) 2018 (reduced) glossary terms propensity. The top figure is a stacked count of term occurrences. The bottom figure is a 100% stacked chart. The term risk is removed from these charts, as it is required to be present in all articles as per the search criteria.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Top figure shows the 14 signal events identified across the timeline within categories. Event 1 is the Columbia shuttle disaster; Event 2 is the Iraq war. Event 3 is the Vioxx drug; Event 4 is Hurricane Katrina; Event 5 is the financial crisis; Event 6 is the Fukushima disaster; Event 7 is the US–Asia relations; Event 8 is hurricane season; Events 9, 10, 11, and 12 are the COVID‐19 and its associated impacts; Event 13 is the US withdraw from Afghanistan; Event 14 is the COVID‐19 vaccine. The methodology for identification of the signal events is described in Section 3.3, and further details on each event are summarized in Table S2. The bottom figure shows trend and signal events that are significant “between” categories in the overall timeline.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Word clouds: (Top) most popular terms in US risk news coverage for 2020 (COVID‐19 outbreak year), (Bottom) most popular terms in US risk news coverage for the full‐time period (2000–2021).
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References

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