 Welcome friends to today's session on risk journalism and this is a very new kind of a concept. It is basically derived from a concept of risk society. So I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about risk society and risk journalism. So in the next few slides, I'll try and introduce the concept of risk society, which may be new for students but it's not a new concept per se and also the concept of risk journalism and uncertainty. So let me just share my screen and we'll start the, just a moment, just give me a moment. So can someone confirm whether you can see the screen? Yes sir, yes sir, it's visible. Thank you so much. So before I start with risk journalism, let's try and first of all find out something about, or let's find out the root of the word risk. Some historians believe that it's derived from the Arabic word r-i-s-k risk which refers to acquisition of wealth and good fortune. And others claim that risk has its origin in the Latin word risko and is a navigational term used by sailors entering uncharted waters. Whenever you enter some place which is not known to you, you are said to enter risko. So that is where many people trace the origins of risk too. This is the dictionary definition of risk. It says the possibility of something bad happening at some time in the future, a situation that could be dangerous or have a bad result. And this is from the advanced learners Oxford Dictionary and we know the different uses that we see on the screen. It could be about health risk. It could be about something about risk of a failure. It could be about risk of cancer for example and risk of trouble so on and so forth. So there are lots and lots of usages of risk as we see in our everyday language. But in terms of sociology or in terms of how we describe our society as, this goes back to this book by Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist. Where he introduced the concept of risk society towards a new modernity. So this was seen as a natural consequence of late modernity. Right from the time that civilization started to or maybe from the pre-industrial era to the industrial era to the risk society era which Beck describes as one of the things linked to the stage of modernization. And the risks he talked was mainly environmental and it was about radioactivity of pollutants, about toxins, about the pollution in water and food and all that. So this is a concept and I will try and introduce the very basics of risk society by Beck in our discussion today. So Beck basically talks of these three different epochs in history. The first one is the pre-industrial society which is the traditional society. Going up to the industrial society which is the first modernity and finally the risk society which is the second modernity. Beck argues that the changes in composition of risk is a light to the transformations in the society. And there are certain inherent characteristics of that so we'll just talk about that. So basically he talks of this as a linear kind of a development from a traditional society to the industrial society and finally to the risk society. So now going back to the, as I said we'll just have a very sketchy detail about the risk society concept as developed by Ulrich Beck. So in the pre-industrial period whenever there were any hazards like drought or famine or plague or any such thing these were the hazards that were found in the pre-industrial period. And at the level of the consciousness of people they attributed it to maybe some God or some demons or even nature or something over which they had no control. So this is how the concept or this is the concept of risk consciousness at that point of time. It was mainly about the natural hazards. In the period of industrial modernity the natural hazards they started complemented, I mean the natural hazards that I just spoke of they started getting complemented by a growing set of humanly produced dangers. So their food habits, their drinking habits, their smoking habits and the occupational hazards that they had to face in their place of work whatever. So this is what started to grow during the industrial era. This is something which was not seen in the pre-industrial era. So all these things were related to the particular epoch, to the particular society that people were living in at that point of time. So a lot of injuries etc because of the industrial machines and all were a direct result of this industrialization. So in this stage of development they had a discrete pool of knowledge about how to regulate these risks. So somebody who was or the problems associated with drinking, how to take care of that or the problems associated with maybe physical injuries, how to take care of that. So this was more or less in control of human beings. They knew how to take care of these risks or how to minimize those risks or even to negotiate with those risks. So at this point of development both the natural disasters and the man-made risks were more or less they were easily taken care of by the human being of that particular era. But in the risk society that Ulrich Beck talks about the environmental risks such as air pollution, chemical warfare and biotechnology. These are the things that he speaks of in my discussion today. We will discuss more about the other risks in the present social structure. So these catastrophic risks are a direct result of the industrial or techno-scientific activities and they dominate the social and cultural sphere of life. And in a previous lecture I had also spoken about the surveillance economy and the unprecedented nature of challenges that human beings are facing. So in a way we can take the surveillance society to be a natural extension or maybe supplementing and complimenting the risk society itself. So in this kind of society and why is this different from the early epochs is because of the social, political, ecological and the individual risks are such huge and are so very unprecedented that they are not under the control of the protective institutions of the industrial society. So all the institutions that were built in the industrial society, the hospitals or the legislative structure and these kind of things, these risks are beyond the control or beyond the impact of those kinds of defences against these disasters. Just to repeat, in the first stage of natural hazards, there was nothing that man could do so that is why he would allude it or he would attribute it to some supernatural power. In the risk society or in the second industrial society, man was generally, I'm just using the term humans I should be saying, that human beings were more or less in control or they knew how to negotiate or to tackle those kind of things. But in the risk society, these are beyond our direct control and these protective institutions of the industrial society have little to help us in the risk society. Anthony Giddens, somebody who's a well-known British sociologist and who's been famous for a lot of things including structuring and the third wave and so on and so forth. Even he has spoken of things like external risks in this present stage of modernization and this is particularly a result of the innovations in science and technology according to Giddens. So although all such external risks were always there, modern societies are these days according to Giddens subject to these manufactured risks such as pollution or modernization or as I said even the newer impact of digital infrastructure and so on and so forth. So this is as I said a new kind of an epoch according to Beck it has been there since the last three and a half decades is because of these innovations and because we have little control over these kind of things. And as I will argue in today's discussion that this leads to uncertainty and that is why the language of risk becomes very important when talking about these kind of issues in today's context. So this is one reason why many of the climate change and health issues are framed as the risk in the context of uncertainty because we are not sure about how these things could be tackled or what shape it could take or even the impact or the level of danger that it could cause to us. And I'm sure you can understand that when we are talking in today's context the context of the pandemic itself is so very relevant here. So that is why this problem of uncertainty is an example is a very important problem to be tackled. And in today's discussion I will put a lot more stress on uncertainty and you know risk itself. Now again I'll go back to back to to talk again about this problem of you know lack of control. A lot of these social insurance that we had in the earlier epochs they are missing and that is why these are this this presents a major problem for us. It presents a problem for the public institutions. It prevents presents a problem for for researchers. And it you know it's a real problem because these environmental risk could ultimately lead in the extermination of the world as we know it. So this is contrasted with the earlier two epochs. This is very very unprecedented because even the social insurance that we had in the because of the public institutions in the earlier two epochs is absent there. What I actually mean by zero is kind of linked to the surveillance economy argument that I put up earlier that the public policy or even you know having the laws against these companies are very difficult because of the unprecedented nature of the challenge that is there. So in the surveillance economies for example we are looking at it in terms of maybe monopoly or privacy but we realize that the problem is much more deeper and that is why it has to be dealt with in a very different manner. So this this is the existing that is why the existing mechanisms of risk management is ineffective because as I said if we if you're looking at digital surveillance in terms of privacy or monopoly then probably we are not looking at the real problem. And that is why these this this expansion this economic scientific and technological expansion it has created these serial risks one after the other. And that is why this risk management that that we had in the earlier epochs is largely ineffective so we have to look at it with a newer prism we have to see it with a different frame. And as I said back talks about three icons of destruction in the book I showed on the third slide. It talks mainly about nuclear power about environmental de-spoilation and genetic technology. So many people would argue that a lot of the health risks we face in the present times is because of the dangers afforded by biochemical engineering or this genetic engineering kind of thing. So each of these has the potential to yield the worst imaginable accident and which it might lead to extinction of human life. So I don't want to sound pessimistic at all but this is what Beck refers to as the icons of destruction in his risk society metaphor. So from there we straightaway go to risk journalism. So what I've tried to give a background off of risk society but we will see that risk journalism is slightly different or there are different contours to that. But it's important to understand the concept of risk society before we have a discussion on the risk journalism. This is a very recent book by Professor Ingrid Volkmar and Kasim Sharif. This is about risk journalism between transnational politics and climate change. And this is kind of a seminal book on risk journalism and in this particular book on page 17 Professor Volkmar describes risk journalism as something which relates not only to climate change but to all the other types of new globalized risks. It ranges from financial crisis to trans societal tax evasion to terrorism to migration and you know all these kind of things which evolve on the non national global local access. So this is no longer limited to the national boundaries and it is no longer you know it can no longer be seen in terms of global oblique local but it is on a continuum of the global local access. So that is where we have to look for risk journalism at. And one of the important things to understand about you know say for example climate change or risk is about the problem of uncertainty. And I will return to this problem again and again in today's discussion. This is about the problems of the problem of science itself or the fact that science itself is very uncertain whether it is medical science or climate science or these kind of sciences. And we make the mistake of confusing school science with research science and that's very very important to understand that in school science everything is very precise everything is very perfect. But science itself deals with uncertainty as part of its internal domain. So we have to understand the problem of uncertainties and in the journalistic field uncertainty presents special problems because as journalists we are trained to talk about specific we are trained to talk we are asked not to use the term maybe or may or things like that in our regular context. So it's important to understand that uncertainty is something that we have to understand as a reality in the present epoch. And again you know this is something that has to be understood before we get into the next part of the argument that there are different risk assessors. So for example if somebody is assessing a risk on behalf of an insurance company then he will be putting more emphasis on the highest end of the risk. I mean he has to keep track of the most risky part so that you know they can put a value on the insured object. At other end people often try to underplay these risk assessments so that there is a range of risk when we talk about you know it could be climate change risk it could be about health risk it could be about financial risk it could be about the risks of digital surveillance society and then so many other risks. So we are looking at we have to look at these uncertainty ranges at times and often people go for the most likely mid-range figures. So as communicators we must be aware of the possibilities or as journalists we must be aware of the possibilities of the upper end of the risk the lower end of the risk and the mid-range most likely figure of the risk. But important to understand that uncertainty does not mean ignorance. Uncertainty is something that we have to live or this is something which is almost synonymous with the present day risk society if I have to use Bex terminology. So it moves more slowly as we have so often seen I mean it's something that you cannot put a date to and often we've seen reports very speculative reports about when and how soon etc. These COVID-19 vaccines would emerge and we know that science reporting and even medical reporting it moves much more slowly than other beats this is nothing specific. So we are reporting among uncertainties and it includes it might include a range of possibilities and and this this has to be understood. So one of the important attributes of risk journalism or risk reporting is to understand the uncertainties present there and the fact that many of these things might take lots and lots of time compared to many other beats. So and the number of possibilities that are present for for you know such cases. This again is a very important book by it's a very important publication by the writers Institute for the study of journalism and they talk about climate change in the media reporting reporting risk and uncertainty. So this is again this was published about five six years back and they talk about things like uncertainty being an obstacle to decision making. And of course that is where the challenge for a journalist is because at some place we are also trying to make the authorities act we want the executive to act in certain cases. And if we are reporting uncertainty then probably we are giving them a long handle that you know okay if it is uncertain then we might as well wait. We might as well not add we might as well not have any policy at all. And that is where the challenge of the risk society and risk journalism is that often this uncertainty which is very scientific is misinterpreted as ignorance. And we have to be very careful about not or putting it across that this uncertainty is something very is very natural and I will you know talk in terms of probabilities and confidence intervals as I go on. But uncertainty is often the impetus for further investigation as we've seen and this this COVID-19 pandemic has led us you know to a lot of the domains which probably we might not even noticed earlier. So one of these is questions of health literacy so we understand that the preparation of vaccines or the you know the experiments over that it might take time it might go in very many different directions very often it might fail so on and so forth. So that is one very important element of risk journalism understanding that uncertainty is is natural. So what we can do is to use the language of risk in instead of using the language of uncertainty we can take it we can you know kind of negotiate it by using the language of risk so that would shift the public debate away from the idea that decisions should be delayed. Because decisions cannot be delayed until conclusive proof because very often there will not be any conclusive proof or absolute certainty. And this has been seen in the case of climate change over a number of years I mean there has been proof from so many other sides and so on and so forth. It was there I mean there are so many vested interests it was there in case of Tobacco for example as well where there were all you know there were a number of research putting you know going out with a view at a certain point of time that Tobacco is not actually that dangerous. So if you're looking for conclusive proof then probably you are creating even more risk so that language of risk is very important of component of risk journalism that absolute certainty may not always be attained. So this can be informed by an analysis of the comparative costs and risks of different choices of options. So if you don't do anything then these are the costs and these are the risks and if you do something then these are the costs and these are the risks and if you do this kind of thing so that has to be a part of the media discourse and as journalists and as media person it's our job to train ourselves and this kind of analysis of the comparative costs and risks involved in these cases where there is no conclusive proof or where there is time till we have conclusive proof. So it's a very as you say a very helpful prism to you know using this risk approach or using the risk frame I will just in the next slide I will explain again you know in a moment time again what framing is but it's important that compared to the messages of disaster or uncertainty so we are not talking about you know for example framing climate change in terms of disaster or uncertainty but we can frame it as a more sophisticated and a more appropriate way of using risk there and you know having a discussion on the levels of risk that I spoke of and as we understand that there is a range of opinions or there is a range of risks involved there so we can keep track of that as we go along. So that is one very helpful frame in which to look at risk. So it can have have you know very adverse impacts and it can be very very technical of assigning probabilities or confidence intervals so as journalists we have to as I said have this in our toolkit of dealing with probabilities and confidence intervals or confidence levels apart from the stories of gloom and doom that are there or you know you know talking of either of the extremes which probably is justified in certain cases because we have to make it palatable to the average reader. But this is something that is a new domain and that is something that we must equip ourselves with. So just the famous Robert Entman's definition of framing. So framing means selecting some aspects of perceived reality and making them more salient in such a way that it promotes a particular problem definition. So as you can understand that it's something that has to be inherent in the way we frame these crises or in the manner in which we frame these events of health and climate change and digital surveillance and even terrorism and migration and all these kind of things. So this is you know using a particular one particular aspect or aspects and making it more salient so that we promote a particular problem definition or a causal interpretation or even moral evaluation and treatment. So in the book that I just spoke off about the writer's book, they did a study on about 350 articles from six countries and they found out these six frames in these risk stories. This was basically about climate change stories. So this is just an indicator of the risk of the framing present in these kind of stories. So the disaster or the implicit risk frame was the most common frame and it was there in almost 80% of the stories. Uncertainty frame because we don't know what might happen we don't know what it might take this kind of a thing. So that was again the second most common frame in these articles on climate change. Opportunity again was a very common frame in these stories and the explicit risk was the least present in these kind of stories. So these are the framing that are available for talking about these crises. So as I've just referred that journalists often are attracted to gloom and doom stories and that's very obvious because that's what carries the headlines. That's what brings in the eyeballs. That's what brings in the clicks. And that's very important that people are looking at something which is extraordinary and something which has greater impact for them. But we have to be exposed to the language and the concept of risk in covering newer challenges. And one of this is to realize that numbers and probabilities and I keep on talking about data journalism in many of my lectures. So numbers and probabilities are likely to become more important. So it's about the potential to quantify these uncertainties and generate these probabilistic projections that has to be enhanced. So it cannot be specific as we've been teaching our students for so long about making it as precise and as specific as possible. Because in these kind of things when we are dealing with uncertainty which is scientific and which is very real and which is very natural and that is where these probabilistic projections are important. And this can be also used by policy makers in very helpful ways for making decisions. So that is one tool kit that we must acquire. This is one skill that as journalists we must be aware of. And again in the same book the author is basically James Painter. He talks about making journalists more familiar with numbers and probabilities. So that's basically one concept of data journalism again. And also using of infographics to illustrate the concept of risk so that visual storytelling or this visual element again becomes very, very important. And even in regular public weather forecasting not to talk with levels of surety or levels of certainty that we talk about. So it's important to rebrand or reframe science itself in that manner that okay science is not about some exactitude or it's not about some exact numbers but it's basically about a probabilistic range. It is about that kind of a confidence interval. So more use of this and that's a very difficult thing because we want to be very, very sure about whether it's going to rain tomorrow or whether we're going to have a chillier day tomorrow. But this is one way that we have to carry forward because again as I said this is important to bring in this element of uncertainty that we are faced with in this risk society. Also, scientists should be very, very clear about the data and so on and so forth as being very affluent and this is one thing that happens. So further as we go along this risk journalism has to have these elements about where there is consensus, where there is uncertainty and what are the element of risks and what are the costs involved and so on and so forth. So and again to emphasize uncertainty does not usually mean ignorance when we are uncertain about certain things does not mean that we don't know anything about it. It means that there are risk elements but we are not aware of the magnitude of those risks or there are very many opinions about the direction and the intensity of those risks. Even for researchers and as communicators and as academicians this is very, very important for us to understand the effect of risk language. Which of the risk language is effective? Under what circumstances? With what kind of people and what metaphors are important? And that's very, very important as researchers and this is one area where a lot can be done in the Indian context as well about the impact or the effect of risk language and how effective under what circumstances. So there are so many possibilities of using risk language and its impact and its effectiveness and its various contours and different kind of associations that we can build to frame certain issues. So as I said this is a very, very new area and this is a wonderful opportunity not only for budding journalists but also for researchers, media and communication researchers to provide a direction to what kind of risk languages work and in what context and with what intensity, with what groups and with what communities etc. etc. So there is a whole range of possibilities for researchers there. I will end with this particular slide here where Professor Valkmar and Kasim Sharif, they say that we have, earlier risk was either understood in the domains of domestic or foreign reporting. But we are dealing with a true globalized, as we said earlier, on the global local access. So conceptual frameworks have been realigned and they have re-emerged. So there's a lot of work happening in this field. So I just leave you with this particular thought about research on this dimension of risk journalism. Thank you so much for your patience and with this I end my presentation on risk journalism.