The ‘story’ in a risk society: A case study of the BBC and the ‘riskiness’ of journalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that one way the ‘story’ has changed is that it has become a source of potential ‘risk’ (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990) for media organizations operating in a globalized media environment. Through applying a ‘risk’ perspective to the practice of journalism, this article argues that the news story is not only a site where risk is represented and contested but also a source of risk for journalists and media organizations. This conceptual argument is made by reflecting on the significance of the external scrutiny and internal reflection of the BBC's coverage of the Middle East crisis. Attention is also given to the BBC's 2009 decision to deny a Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) appeal for Gaza and how this management decision may be understood in ‘risk’ terms. A larger theoretical objective is to illustrate the utility of a ‘risk’ approach as a new theoretical lens to critically explore the practice of journalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".