Institutionalisation of Risk Communication in Indian Media: A Post-COVID Analysis of Health Emergency and Disease Outbreak Coverage

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled Indian newsrooms to adopt risk-communication conventions swiftly: transparent acknowledgement of scientific uncertainty, systematic triangulation of official and expert sources, and thematic rather than episodic framing of disease progression, which had been largely absent from routine health journalism prior to 2020. Whether these practices became embedded, durable newsroom routines or were quietly abandoned once pandemic urgency subsided remains empirically unexamined in the Indian context. This paper develops a conceptual framework, termed the Institutionalization of Risk Communication (IRC) framework, that integrates institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), journalism routines literature (Tuchman, 1978; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014), and crisis and emergency risk communication theory (Covello, 1992; Reynolds & Seeger, 2005) to explain variation in the post-crisis retention of risk-communication practice across English-language, vernacular, and digital-native Indian media. Drawing on framing theory (Entman, 1993; Iyengar, 1991; Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000) and the social amplification of risk framework (Kasperson et al., 1988), the paper articulates testable propositions and a mixed-methods research design combining longitudinal comparative content analysis with newsroom interviews to assess institutionalisation empirically. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded, India-specific model for understanding how crisis-induced journalistic innovation either becomes embedded in standard newsroom practice or reverts to episodic, event-driven health reporting.