Constructions of Risks to Life in News Media

This book investigates the construction of risks through discourse to provide new insights into the relationship between risk discourse and society. It explores how British newspapers used language to discursively construct four different types of risks to life, namely terror attacks, earthquakes, road accidents, and heart attacks, between 2017 and 2020, examining what makes some risk events newsworthy, and how this relates to the way they are perceived. The author offers new insights into risk reporting by using an approach combining theories and methodologies from corpus linguistics and critical discourse studies focusing on news values and risk perception. Through a focus on risks to life, related social actors, and consequences, he demonstrates salient discursive strategies found in risk reporting, including dramatisation, naturalisation, impersonalisation, blame, responsibility, and risk management. These strategies contribute differently to the construction of the risks and can potentially be linked to how the media amplify or attenuate risk perception in society, a consequence of media language use. This interdisciplinary book goes beyond linguistics to engage with discussions related to media studies, e.g. the concentration of media ownership in the UK, and news values; risk literature, e.g. risk perception, sociological theories of risk, and risk communication; and the relationship between media and risk perception, and studies related to each risk.

Rakan Alibri is Assistant Professor in the Languages and Translation Department at Tabuk University, Saudi Arabia.

Michaela Mahlberg is Humboldt-Professor and Professor of Digital Humanities at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate within the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.