Risk and Causality in Newspaper Reporting
2009
The study addresses the textual representation of risk and causality in news media reporting. The analytical framework combines two theoretical perspectives: media frame analysis and the philosophy of causality. Empirical data derive from selected newspaper articles on risks in the Göta älv river valley in southwest Sweden from 1994 to 2007. News media content was coded and analyzed with respect to causal explanations of risk issues. At the level of individual articles, this study finds that the media provide simple causal explanations of risks such as water pollution, landslides, and flooding. Furthermore, these explanations are constructed, or framed, in various ways, the same risk being attributed to different causes in different articles. However, the study demonstrates that a fairly complex picture of risks in the media emerges when extensive material is analyzed systematically.
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