Media Use And Environmental Risk Perception:the Mediation Effect Of Trust Mode

Since China's reform and opening up,China has undergone rapid urbanization transformation,which has made great progress in social economy and faced increasingly serious environmental risks.Urban cities,meanwhile,have witnessed drastic environmental changes and damages in the transformation process of urbanization,including air pollution,water pollution,noise pollution,increasing the environmental risk management challenge for the city.How the public views their environmental problems directly affects the effectiveness of risk communication and the cost of risk management.The amplified risk perception may lead to excessive stigmatization to specific institutions and locations,causing regional economic loss and even unnecessary social panic.The vicious ripple effect could then reproduce a new round of social risk.Overly attenuated risk perception may cause the public to underestimate the real risk,and then neglect the risk prevention.Therefore,to explore the factors influencing the public environmental awareness of risk can help people(risk managers and the public)grasp the imbalance in the formation of "perception",and then gain a more comprehensive insight towards risk management,at the same time for risk management personnel provide advice for more effective risk communication policy.This study takes the Social Amplification of Risk Framework(SARF)as the core theory basis,focusing on the influence of media use on environmental Risk perception,and proposes three hypothesis.Firstly,based on SARF theory,this paper discusses the influence of the media use of urban residents on public environmental risk perception in China,and puts forward the"amplification effect hypothesis" of media use and environmental risk perception.Secondly,according to the divergent characteristics between traditional media and new media,the hypothesis of“risk perception difference effect" is put forward.Finally,we introduce the trust model(interpersonal trust and political trust)as the intermediary variables to further analyze the mechanism of this effect.Traditional media tends to build a conservative political context,which is conducive to cultivating interpersonal trust and thereby reducing public risk perception.The new media encourage multiple open society context,which may erode the political trust,so as to enhance the public's risk perception.In this paper,the construction of two different interpretation of the trust path,it puts forward the model of trust "double path effect" hypothesis.Using 2013 Chinese general social survey(CGSS2013),the article tested the above three hypothesis,and reached following main conclusions:(1)the media use frequency positively affects the environmental risk perception,the higher the media use frequency,the higher the degree of public environmental risk perception;(2)compared with traditional media users,media users with new media as the main source of information display a higher level of environmental risk perception;(3)the conservative communication context of traditional media is conducive to creating positive interpersonal trust,thus reducing environmental risk perception;(4)the open communication context of new media will reduce the public's political trust,thus enhancing the perception of environmental risk.This study takes the trust model as the intermediary variable and analyzes the social psychological mechanism behind the influence of media use on the environmental risk perception.The research has enriched the research perspective of SARF theory,which is dominated by communication science,and has revealed the complex relationship between media use and risk perception.In addition,the system of public trust level for nurturing risk cognitive function should cause the attention of risk managers,the environmental protection department relevant policymakers should further implement environmental protection policy,timely report the work progress,enhance interpersonal trust.At the same time,it should also increase the use of network platforms for malicious walking of false information and cause social panic attacks of individuals or groups,while ensuring the authenticity and legality of the information in the new media platform.