Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D, is a professor in the School of Communication at American University where his research focuses on the intersections between science, media, and politics. E-MAIL: nisbetmc@gmail.com
Pew has released an in depth analysis of news coverage of the Pope's U.S. visit. As I have posted previously, some media critics have claimed that the press gave the Pontiff a pass on hard-hitting questions while polls show that the Pope's visit was a major public relations success.
As the Pew news analysis finds, the Pope's visit dominated headlines, accounting for 16% of the total news hole for the week, eclipsing for example the 5% of coverage devoted to the war in Iraq and second in attention only to the 31% of coverage devoted to the election. According to Pew, the saturation coverage of the Pope's visit makes it one of the top four news stories of 2008.
Also of interest was the strategic framing by the Vatican of the sexual abuse scandals, a framing controlled by way of careful news management including the stipulation that journalists had to submit their questions in advance. Here's what Pew finds about how the Pope's preferred "shame" framing was echoed in the press:
Pope Benedict said he felt "deeply ashamed" of the scandal, offering a description of his personal emotion, which the media emphasized. ABC's Chris Cuomo, reporting the next day on "Good Morning America," described the scene this way: "Even before his plane ... touched down, the pope addressed one of the most troubling issues in the American Catholic Church, the priest abuse scandal, telling reporters on his flight that the shame of the church is deeply felt."
The New York Times' April 16 headline said, "Pope, in U.S., Is 'Ashamed' of Pedophile Priests." On CNN's "AndersonCooper360," the network's veteran Vatican analyst, John Allen, said he was the reporter who submitted the question on the scandal several days before the trip began. Allen was told the pope would answer the question in Italian. "I stressed to the pope," said Allen, "that, because this was such an important topic, it would be valuable to have it from him in English. And he was quite ready to do that. So, I think what that reflects is an understanding on the part of this pope that he cannot come into the United States and not engage what has been the deepest wound in the life of the Catholic Church in this country for more than its 200-year history, which, of course, is the sex abuse crisis."
Here are the key findings of the Pew analysis:
1. The media devoted significant amounts of time and space to the story. All told, the pope's visit accounted for 16% of the overall "newshole," the time or space available in an outlet for news content, during the week of April 14-20. In the first four months of 2008, the only stories that received more coverage during a single week were the presidential campaign, the troubled U.S. economy and the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal.
2. Two story lines dominated the coverage. Out of all the newshole dedicated to the pope's visit, more than half (54%) was comprised of stories that focused on the impact of the clergy sex abuse scandal (37%) or on the relationship between Pope Benedict and American Catholics (17%).
3. Coverage, for the most part, ignored the pope's relationships with external constituencies. Just 1% focused on the pope's relationships with other religious leaders or other faiths, and only 3% focused on the pope and the Bush administration or the pope and American politics. Only 2% of the coverage made any reference to the U.S. presidential campaign.
What the media did not cover during the pope's U.S. visit may be as noteworthy as what it did cover:
* A controversial 2006 portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad by Pope Benedict prompted a global uproar among Muslims, and the pope's March 2008 baptism of a Muslim convert to Catholicism raised more than a few eyebrows, yet the pope's April 17 meeting in Washington, D.C., with Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Jews received little media attention. Overall, only 1% of the newshole dedicated to the pope's visit focused on his relations with other religious leaders or faiths.
* On April 16, Pope Benedict became only the second pontiff ever to visit the White House. He met privately with President Bush to discuss, among other things, the plight of Christians in Iraq. He also gave an address on the South Lawn in which he said, "a democracy without values can lose its very soul." The more political aspects of the pope's visit were not a major factor in the coverage. Only 3% focused on the pope and the Bush administration or on Pope Benedict and American politics.
* In a presidential election year, the pope touched on a few policy issues that went beyond the church's well-known opposition to abortion. For example, the pope addressed environmentalism, saying that "the earth itself groans under the weight of consumerist greed and irresponsible exploitation." He also commented on immigration in a joint statement with Bush that pointed to "the need for a coordinated policy" that ensures "humane treatment and the well being" of immigrant families. But with a few notable exceptions, such as an April 20 New York Times article on the pope and his immigration stance, such issues were not a major focus of coverage. Less than 2% of the coverage made any reference to the U.S. presidential campaign.
Can a radio talk show host motivate Republicans to turn out in a Democratic primary and vote strategically for a candidate? Past research suggests that political talk radio can have an independent influence on political participation, but in the primaries last week, how much specific impact did Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos have on the primary results?
Limbaugh urged his mostly Republican listeners to turn out and vote for Clinton. I am sure we will see analysis and papers from political scientists on this topic, but for now, here's the best summary of the exit poll data that I have seen, from a report in yesterday's Washington Post:
Those looking for evidence of Limbaugh's influence pointed to Clinton's edge among Republicans in Indiana and North Carolina. In Indiana, 10 percent of Democratic primary voters described themselves as Republicans, a higher rate than in any state but Mississippi, and they went for Clinton by eight percentage points, according to exit polls. In North Carolina, they were 5 percent of the electorate, and went for her by 29 points.
By contrast, Obama won Republican voters, often by very large margins, in seven of the eight states where exit polls were able to report the group before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, when Limbaugh first coaxed listeners to vote for Clinton.
Also notable was that in Indiana, six in 10 Republicans who supported Clinton on Tuesday said they would vote for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain over Clinton in the fall, if that were the matchup. By contrast, most Republicans who voted for Obama said they would back him against McCain. And a slight majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton in Indiana told pollsters that she does not share their values, raising further questions about why they supported her.
But at least as much data suggested that many Republicans voted for Clinton because the Democratic primary was the more meaningful one and because they simply preferred her to Obama. In Indiana, about nine in 10 GOP Clinton voters said she would make a better commander in chief, and more than six in 10 said she would have a better shot at beating McCain.
And Clinton's edge among Indiana Republicans was relatively small, if set against the broader racial divisions in the contest. Her eight-point advantage among Republicans, nearly all of whom are white in the state, was much narrower than it was among white Democrats, whom she won by nearly 2 to 1 over Obama.
Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, said that he concluded from the data that while Operation Chaos "existed to some extent, I don't think it was a major factor."
Bill McKibben's latest grassroots project is the launch of www.350.org, a Web portal and blog designed to focus world attention on cutting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.
From the Web site:
Dear friends,
350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.
We're planning an international campaign to unite the world around the number 350, and we need your help. We need to make sure that the solutions the world proposes to climate change are to scale with the level of crisis that this number represents. Everyone on earth, from the smallest village to the cushiest corner office, needs to know what 350 means. The movement to spread that number needs to be beautiful, creative, and unstoppable.
What we need most right now are on-the-ground examples for how to take the number 350 and drive it home: in art, in music, in political demonstrations, in any other way you can imagine. We hope this project will grow tremendously in the months to come, and it helps all the more if people can see the great things others are doing already. We will connect actions all around the world and make them add up to more than the sum of their parts-but we don't have all the ideas and all the inspiration. We need you to act on yours.
McKibben the author has turned his focus to becoming a global climate change movement builder. In an interview with Environment & Energy Daily, here's what he says about his strategy (transcript):
Monica Trauzzi: In a recent article you wrote, "We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement, as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we're not going to best the fossil fuels companies and the auto makers and the rest of the vested of interests that are keeping us from change." Are all the elements coming into place now? Is that happening?
Bill McKibben: Let's hope so. I mean I'm doing what little I can. We launched last year this movement called Step It Up '07 and working with a few college students I organized about 1400 demonstrations around the country on global warming last year. And in this country we managed to get our message across. Our demand for 80 percent carbon cuts by 2050 became the centerpiece of both Obama and Clinton's energy and environmental platform and it's reflected in the Lieberman-Warner legislation making its way through Congress. Now, we're taking on the next most difficult question, which is how we're going to get the whole world behind this kind of climate stuff. We've just formed, the same crew of mine, has just formed a new group called 350.org, three, five, zero dot org, to launch a global grassroots campaign. The number refers to what the scientist Jim Hansen in particular is now telling us is the safe uppermost limit of carbon in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. A tough number, because we're already at 385 and, you know, we've got to cut back now if we're going to have some hope of getting there. So that's what I work on a lot of the time and I turn to writers like this for kind of inspiration and guidance about what worked in the past and what didn't work in the past. We've got one more bite at this apple, so we better get it right.
Following his first visit to the United States as spiritual leader of the world's Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI is viewed more favorably than he was a few weeks before his trip. Currently, 61% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of the pope, up from 52% in late March. Views of Pope Benedict's outreach to other faiths have shown substantial improvement. Roughly half (51%) of those who have heard at least a little about the pope say he has done an excellent or good job with respect to his interfaith efforts while just 29% rate his efforts in this area as only fair or poor. In late March, the public was evenly split in assessments of the pope's promotion of relations with other religions in March (39% excellent or good vs. 40% only fair or poor).
Opinions of Pope Benedict's handling of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal, an issue raised by the pontiff several times during his visit, are more mixed. About half (48%) who have heard something about the pope rate his efforts in addressing the scandal as only fair or poor, while 39% say he has done a good or excellent job in this regard.
This week's On the MediaspotlightsRushmore Drive, the new search engine marketed to African Americans (audio above). As the program describes, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to find those sites that are most heavily trafficked by blacks and to return them at the top of the search results. From host Bob Garfield's interview with CEO Johnny Taylor:
JOHNNY TAYLOR: The algorithm, it's one of the few places where the black community becomes the majority for purposes of producing results. In all of the mainstream search engines, the majority's behavior is what detects how the results are ultimately delivered.
BOB GARFIELD: So you actually kind of rig the game by giving more prominence, based on ratings or whatever, to certain websites because they are identifiably black?
JOHNNY TAYLOR: There's no rigging of the game. We have created the new game. We have finally found a way to deliver something more relevant to a targeted group of people. What the algorithm attempts to do, based upon behavior of this community, is to elevate those results that mean something specifically to the audience. So, for example, typing in the word "Whitney" at a search engine may yield Whitney Houston and Whitney M. Young, two prominent African-American individuals, and in a mainstream search engine it may only yield results for Whitney College or Whitney Museum. What we do is deliver all four. So it's not a rigging of anything. It's a new way to crawl the Web and deliver a more relevant search experience.
Besides marketing and online advertising, BlackPlanet.org co-founder Omar Wasow notes the possible benefits for news consumers:
OMAR WASOW: It may not be that when people are going to do searches for, you know, sort of headline news that Rushmore Drive is going to give a better perspective than Google. But, you know, when you're looking for - you know, take the stories that are dominating the headlines now - Obama and Jeremiah Wright - there's a black perspective on that that's not going to be reflected in the mainstream media.
Yet greater choice and selectivity online are not always good things, as I have noted in many posts here at Framing Science and as my undergraduate classes have debated at this blog. In a second segment (audio above), On the Media focuses on the problem of homophily or the tendency for "birds of a feather to flock together."
BOB GARFIELD: Rushmore Drive and BlackPlanet hope to capitalize on the collective interests of a particular group on the principle of "birds of a feature flock together," what social scientists call homophily.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Behaviorists say it's human nature, but Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, observes that homophily is amplified on the Net, and that ought to be cause for concern.
In an age where TV news offers more and more opinion and less and less international coverage, the Internet would seem to be the logical place to find diverse views, surprising voices and news we need. But, he says, we don't find that because we don't know where to look, and mostly because we prefer to flock.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: I'm a little worried about homophily because I think homophily has the danger of making us stupid. And I mean that quite literally. I think that in a digital media world where we have the ability to pick and choose whatever it is that we want to look at, we've gone from a supply problem to a demand problem.
In the age of broadcast media, where we had four television networks and, you know, most cities had one or two major newspapers, you were trusting that media outlet to give you a wide view of the world, to let you know about stories you might not otherwise find, and there was a really big, strong editorial function there.
And one of my questions is how do we build an Internet that doesn't just show us what we want to see but also does a pretty good job of showing us what we need to see?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: I think we're at a break point. A lot of people realize that there's something broken in the media environment. The problem is we're not yet in a position to pass the baton onto participatory media on the Internet because we haven't really thought through these issues yet.
Could we build a news portal where 80 percent of the stuff is pointed to by people like you and 20 percent pointed to by people very much unlike you? It would be interesting if we could get sort of our different echo chambers to agree to have sort of an exchange program.
Do voters under the age of 30 always trend more liberal and more likely to vote Democrat? Contrary to conventional wisdom, history and data say "No."
Political preferences are a product not just of lifecycle shifts but are also linked to the political climate. As Pew reviews in a recent analysis (graph above), the current generation of young voters, who came of age during the turmoil, scandal, and failures of the George W. Bush presidency, trend strongly Democrat, just as the previous generation of GenXers who grew up in the prosperous Reagan years trended Republican. Here's more from the Pew report:
In surveys conducted between October 2007 and March 2008, 58% of voters under age 30 identified or leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who identified or leaned toward the GOP. The Democratic Party's current lead in party identification among young voters has more than doubled since the 2004 campaign, from 11 points to 25 points.
In fact, the Democrats' advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP -- making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.
Among today's "Dotcom" generation, born after 1976, there are other important differences. As the recent book A New Engagement documents, the Dotcom generation is more likely to be inclined towards community volunteering than traditional electoral participation. And rather than a deep interest in party politics, Dotcom-ers are more likely to be engaged with social movement politics related to global issues such as human rights, fair trade, and/or the environment.
A round up of recent news coverage where I have provided analysis...
1. USA Today ran this profile of actor Ed Begley, focusing on his commitment to environmental issues and a green lifestyle. Here's what I said about the impact that citizens can have on their peers when they become advocates for a cause such as environmental conservation:
Early adopters of such practices "definitely make a difference," says Matthew Nisbet, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., who studies public affairs.
"Citizens who eagerly adopt environmentally friendly behaviors are what marketers call 'influentials.' These are everyday opinion leaders who, through the visibility of their actions or by talking up their opinions and passing on recommendations about products, influence neighbors, co-workers and friends," Nisbet says.
Although celebrity endorsements are a bit different in their impact than the influence of fellow neighbors and co-workers, the concept tracks closely the type of climate change opinion-leader campaigns that I have been writing about at this blog and elsewhere.
2. ClimateWire, a news syndication service that covers the environment and energy, ran a feature[password] analyzing American perceptions of climate change and the relationship to the policy debate. It's one of the best discussions of public opinion I've seen in the press, with some interesting comments from various pollsters and experts.
Here's what I had to say, an interpretation that will be familiar to readers of this blog or articles that I have written. See for example this recent study I did analyzing two decades of polling trends on global warming (PDF).
"The conventional wisdom is that media coverage and An Inconvenient Truth [former Vice President Al Gore's documentary on global warming] changed public opinion," said Matthew Nisbet, an assistant professor of communication at American University. "Instead, most of the impact was to intensify things for those who already care about climate change."
....Regardless of the source of the lackluster interest, many political scientists have indicated that the current apathy presents a problem for potential passage of climate legislation.
"Whenever you have systematic policy challenges that have a lot of costs, some in Congress need to see in polls that there is public support," said Nisbet. "If I had to guess, I'd say maybe at the end of 2009 we'll get something through."
...To change that, supporters of controlling carbon dioxide emissions should consider reframing the issue around new green jobs and spiraling energy costs, which already rank as high priorities with Democrats and Republicans, American University professor Nisbet said.
McCain's environmental adviser, James Woolsey, made a similar point recently when he said he had convinced a Republican congressman to support climate control measures after tying the topic to terrorism in a hearing. The congressman said, "If we're doing it for that reason, then fine," Woolsey recalled this month at an panel of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
One blogger has posted the full syndicated article here.
3. Finally, the June issue of The Scientist magazine profiles my colleague Timothy Caulfield, a professor of law at the University of Alberta and Director of the Health Law Institute. Caulfield is one of the leading scholars studying the intersection of policy, the media, and bioethics.
In recent projects, Caulfield has been analyzing news coverage of genetics, examining the tendency of the press to hype certain discoveries, or alternatively to report negatively on specific high-profile patent cases. Here's what I had to say to The Scientist about Caulfield's work:
"Tim [Caulfield] has done a very good job of bringing to bear the uncertainties of science," says Matthew Nisbet at American University in Washington, DC. "He's shown that the media doesn't just reflect the policy debate; it actively shapes it."
The June issue of The Scientist featuring the profile should be online later this week.
As I wrote yesterday, one of the emotional strategies employed in Expelled is to paint atheist pundits as the stand-ins for "big science," in the process selectively avoiding interviews with any of the many prominent scientists who have emphasized the compatibility between evolution and religious perspectives.
And as I noted in this earlier post, the claim by Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and other atheist hardliners that science undermines the validity of religion, even respect for religion, is at odds with the consensus view in the scientific community as represented by organizations such as the National Academies or the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
While Dawkins and Myers are to be commended for their tireless work to counter the pseudoscientific claims of the ID movement, their equally tireless commitment to ridiculing religion presents the public with mixed messages about the important differences between science, atheism, and faith.
As Dawkins even admits, he is a strategic liability to what he sometimes condescendingly refers to as the evolution defense lobby. Indeed, the association in the public's mind between evolution and atheism is only likely to grow stronger with the media campaign to promote Dawkins' next book, Only a Theory, for which he reportedly received a $3.5 million advance.
In today's NY Times, Cornelia Dean profiles Francisco Ayala, one of the scientists that Stein conveniently avoids interviewing in Expelled. Ayala is past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a former Catholic priest, and is author of Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion. In the article, here's what Ayala has to say about the confusing message of the New Atheist movement:
He said he was saddened when he saw the embrace of evolution identified with, as he put it, "explicit atheism," as in the books of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or other writers on science and faith.
Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God is susceptible to scientific proof, Dr. Ayala said, and equating science with the abandonment of religion "fits the prejudices" of advocates of intelligent design and other creationist ideas.
"Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge," he writes in the new book. "It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical."
It is important that Dr. Ayala "is not a religion-basher," Dr. Scott said, "because creationists always showcase the religion-bashers in science as if they speak for all scientists. They clearly do not speak for Francisco and many others."
Nevertheless, Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer.
"I don't want to be tagged," he said. "By one side or the other."
Dallas Morning News runs this profile of Premise Media CEO A. Logan Craft. The feature spotlights the results of theater exit data collected by Premise and sheds additional light on the range of impacts I discussed earlier today.
Just like with polls released by political candidates or advocacy groups, these figures are to be interpreted with caution. But of interest from the article is that Premise is looking at the theater run as at least a six week experiment, with this past weekend being a big test. (The film earned another $1.4 million.) Also, given the selective nature of the audience, the film is apparently generating a very strong word-of-mouth which could go a long way in mobilizing more of the born-again market segment.
Premise Media hired Chicago-based Market Data Corp. to conduct extensive exit polls to see who is coming to see Expelled and what they think of it. Last weekend, 1,100 moviegoers were interviewed as they left theaters in six states. Mr. Craft is encouraged by the findings. The audiences were almost equally split between men and women. That means that it's not a chick flick or a Rambo and that couples are coming, he says.
Eighty-five percent were between the ages of 24 and 64, and 24 percent were 45 to 54. Asked if they were born-again Christians, 80 percent said yes. Although 22 percent of the moviegoers were Baptists, there was a rainbow of other religions represented. (Oddly enough, of 1,100 respondents in six states, there wasn't a single Episcopalian.)
"Our best-performing theater was in Saratoga, Calif., a high-end suburb of San Jose. Who'da thunk it?" Mr. Craft says. "Our highest-producing theaters were all high-end and west of the Mississippi. That was really a surprise." Some poorer-performing markets included Port Arthur, Texas, and Biloxi, Miss.
Mr. Craft draws a circle around one statistic: 96 percent said they'd recommend Expelled. "This is huge. That's off the charts." If Expelled does turn a profit, Mr. Craft and his partners would like to create an investment fund to finance a variety of media projects, including other documentaries with a point of view. "But we'll have to wait and see what happens in the next six weeks," he says.
