Discursive Strategies in the Media Construction of Risks to Life

Society is increasingly preoccupied with a multitude of risks, each possessing the potential to become a crisis. When multiple crises intersect, they can constitute a polycrisis. From a socially constructed perspective, crises are viewed as perceived risks, and the media play a role in shaping risk perception. According to the Social Amplification of Risk Framework, this role amplifies or attenuates such perception (Kasperson et al., Risk Analysis 8:177–187, 1988), prompting a realization of the need to explore the media construction of risk, an area where linguistic studies have a limited contribution (Tang and Rundblad, Applied Linguistics 38:666–87, 2017). This chapter presents discursive strategies found in the media construction of four risks to life: terror attacks, earthquakes, road accidents, and heart attacks. The salient discursive strategies used to construct these risks are dramatization and naturalization, (im)personalization, blame/responsibility, and risk management. The chapter demonstrates these strategies with their potential impact on risk perception and illustrates how they can be realized linguistically (or in discourse) by presenting examples taken from news articles published by British newspapers between 2017 and 2019. The influence of the media construction of risks to life on management of polycrisis is also discussed.