Abstract
News coverage of hazards is often commented to be of critical importance to individuals' perceived risk associated with tourist destinations. Despite the significance of this issue to the global tourism industry, the link between portrayals of hazards and audience reception is rarely studied in this context. This study adopted the framing theory to evaluate media effect on tourists' perceived risk of portrayals of terrorism and political instability incidents. This involved a survey-embedded experiment which manipulated potential elements of a news report concerning a hazard. The content of fictitious articles used in the experiment was created on the basis of extant risk perception theories. Results revealed that the use of risk amplifying frame and risk attenuating frame result in higher and lower ratings of risk respectively. Moreover, tourist psychographic characteristics were found to moderate the influence of news frames on perceived risk. Implications for tourism destination managers and marketers were discussed.
Highlights
The media coverage of hazards is fundamental as to the way in which some hazards are perceived as risky and some are trivialised (Flynn, Slovic, & Kunreuther, 2001; Kasperson, 2005; Petts, HorlickJones, & Murdock, 2001)
The focus of this study is to examine tourists' perceptions and attitudes in relation to coverage of the complex hazards of terrorism and Political instability (PI)
A non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test was run to examine the differences in perceived risk between the groups of respondents exposed to different article versions
Summary
The media coverage of hazards is fundamental as to the way in which some hazards are perceived as risky and some are trivialised (Flynn, Slovic, & Kunreuther, 2001; Kasperson, 2005; Petts, HorlickJones, & Murdock, 2001). While providing people with crucial information in a timely manner, news media coverage of hazards is commonly believed to be associated with producing distorted understanding of safety levels at destinations (Chew & Jahari, 2014; Larsen, Brun, Torvald, & Selstad, 2011; L’Etang, Falkheimer, & Lugo, 2007). This is of importance to Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) who wish to minimise negative impacts of such coverage by understanding how potential tourists make sense and act upon this information and devising their own communication strategies to convey a more balanced view of the situation (Baxter & Bowen, 2004; Ritchie, Dorrell, Miller, & Miller, 2004). The need for a study in this area is reinforced by a recent call on framing effects research in tourism by Liu and Pennington-Gray (2015)
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