Health and illness as drivers of risk language in the news media – a case study of The Times

Since the 1980s, a growing body of scholarship suggests that societal concerns and management of risk have become a central feature of modernising societies. Most prominently Ulrich Beck has asserted that modern societies were increasingly confronted with the side-effects of social progress challenging the modern machinery, such as science and insurance, to manage risk. Since this early focus on technological advancement and environmental degeneration, there have been little systematic empirical analyses of the forces that drove the proliferation of risk in the public sphere. Following suggestions by Luhmann, among others, that the risk semantic is central to modernisation and Skolbekken’s description that since 1945 medical journals have experienced a ‘risk epidemic’, this article examines the developments and events responsible for the social proliferation of health risk. In particular, I utilise The Times corpus (1790–2009) provided by the Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences research centre at Lancaster University, and the corpus linguistics tool CQPweb, for a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of language in its social contexts. I argue that the occurrence and increasingly widespread use of the ‘at risk’-expression indicate a transformation of public consciousness related to a growing social prominence of health and well-being, the normalisation of rational management of health, and the definition of social reality by its ‘at risk’-status.