Changing Discourses of Risk and Health-Risk: a corpus analysis of the usage of risk language in The New York Times
Jens Zinn
University of Melbourne
In recent decades the increasing digitisation of newspaper archives has opened new opportunities for the social sciences to examine social change. This is of particular interest for the sociology of risk and uncertainty, where different approaches compete to explain historical social transformations. This chapter reports results from an ongoing research project that examines longitudinal changes in risk reporting in print news media by the example of The New York Times (NYT). It has two major purposes. Firstly, we aim to demonstrate the usefulness of techniques from corpus and computational linguistics as means of examining how social change may be reflected in print news media. Secondly, we aim to examine a number of hypotheses from common sociological theories. Here, we show that there is good evidence for the increasing institutionalisation of risk practices in a growing number of social domains. Analysing language use in approximately 150,000 articles spanning the past 28 years, we find empirical support for the individualisation of risk, for a growing possibilistic approach to risk, and for decreasing agency in risk discourses. Focussing specifically on health-related articles, we uncover evidence for the growing salience of non-infectious diseases, and for an increase in the frequency with which health, risk and science and technology discourses co-occur. We conclude with perspectives for further research.