London Metropolitan University

The touchstone for any recent discussion of risk is of course Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, published in English in 1992. As a number of writers (Tulloch and Lupton 2001, Cottle 1998) have pointed out, Beck has acknowledged the importance of media in the risk society (Beck 1992: 46) even if he has not analysed its impact in any systematic way. This has led to calls for further detailed study of the media’s role in the risk society. Cottle for instance has argued that Beck’s ‘suggestive ’ ideas “demand empirical support ” (1998: 10). This paper draws on research taking both a wider theoretical perspective on risk, as well as a more specific, empirical, context-based risk audience approach, to present and discuss some of the ways in which audience perspectives on various kinds of risk might be understood and negotiated. Beck’s focus tends to be on large scale, potentially catastrophic, risks such as environmental pollution, which occur as by-products of late modern societies- what he calls modernisation risks. These risks, he suggests, to some extent threaten everyone; that is they are egalitarian: “poverty is hierarchic; smog is democratic ” (1992: 36