Early media coverage of COVID-19, between 1 January and 31 March 2020, provided Alternative Media Personalities (AMPs) an opportunity to provide conspiratorial misinformation to their online audiences. Far-right AMPs may reframe sociopolitical aspects of risk to produce ‘fake-news’, amplifying future risks arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) to define factors of risk amplification, this study conducted a framing analysis upon 1,895 minutes of streamed video content from a popular, far-right, AMP regarding COVID-19. Significant differences in frame expression suggested that AMPs hold greater value in specific frames when providing infotainment based upon authentic interpretations of risk. A lack of significant change in frame expression over time suggests that AMPs may rely upon media templates when communicating risk to their audience. Qualitative data suggest that different aspects of risk amplification work in concert to provide discursive contexts for far-right AMPs to define risks from their ideological standpoint. The data provided by this study better outline some of the complexities facing scientific communications strategies which seek to directly address misinformation online.

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Since the 1990s, news media has become central to informing the public understanding of healthand environmental risks. News media often ‘amplifies’ risks by drawing upon underlyingsociopolitical narratives to confer an additional sense of danger. A previous study has indicated that,since the 2000s, the British media attempted to improve the standard of science journalism withinrisk reporting. Through interviews with thirty members of the British national daily press, thepresent study investigates what changes to newswork have occurred which seem to have impactedthe quality of science reporting. Using time as a motif to guide analysis, the findings of this studysuggest that the shift to predominantly online reporting across the 2010s was associated with adecline in quality of science journalism. Interviewees reported that the technologies which liberatednews work from temporal demands in the 2000s have now become restrictive. New time pressureshave emerged which were blamed for undermining journalistic standards of information processing.Additionally, interviewees suggested that expanding public time horizons has produced newsaudiences who are seeking information on existential risks, which is being served by conspiracytheorists online. The findings of this study present a clear sociological challenge; how arecontemporary journalists to tackle misinformation within the public debate if they feel constrainedby time restraints to simply reproduce information?