“Superbugs” in the Risk Society: Assessing the Reflexive Function of North American Newspaper Coverage of Antimicrobial Resistance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is covered in four elite North American newspapers and whether the dailies act as sites of reflexive modernization. I draw on risk society theory to situate AMR as a modern risk and news media as key spaces for reflexivity. Through a qualitative content analysis of 89 news stories on AMR, this study shows that this risk is communicated through inaccurate definitions and oversimplified accounts of the causes, populations at risk, and preventive measures. Media representations of health risks affect public perceptions of risk and risk prevention. The dailies, however, seldom expressed reflexive modernization, a key function of “mass media” in the Risk Society, which I argue could be due to the very complexity of “modern risks.” Lack of reflexivity in the media regarding AMR could delay crucial policy and institutional changes necessary to tackle this risk.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it