Matthew Nisbet
Professor of Communication at Northeastern University.
nisbetmc
Posts by this author
May 12, 2008
Since Earth Day, a number of polls have been released confirming that public opinion on climate change has changed very little over the past two years or since the premiere of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the…
May 11, 2008
Obama as young Luke Skywalker, Hillary as Darth Vader, Bill as the Emperor, Bill Richardson as Han Solo. This new viral video promoting Obama's candidacy is brilliant and effective humor. Just more evidence as to why Obama is engaging young voters like no other presidential candidate in recent…
May 9, 2008
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…
May 9, 2008
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…
May 7, 2008
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…
May 6, 2008
Evidence for the influence of an effective media strategy, from a just released Pew survey:
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…
May 5, 2008
This week's On the Media spotlights Rushmore 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…
May 5, 2008
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 (…
May 1, 2008
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…
April 29, 2008
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…
April 28, 2008
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…
April 28, 2008
Two weeks ago, as Expelled premiered in more than a 1,000 theaters across the country, I went with several friends and graduate students for an early Friday evening screening at the Regal Cinema located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC. The medium sized theater was about 80% full.…
At the NYTimes and the WSJ, Just 2% of Front Page Stories Focus on Either Science or the Environment
April 28, 2008
In an analysis released last week, Pew reports that during a three month period (Dec. 13-March 13, 2008), only 2% of front page stories at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal focused either on the environment or science/technology. The finding is troubling on a number of fronts.
First…
April 27, 2008
In the wake of Clinton's victory in Pennsylvania, the NY Times editorialized that Hillary's campaign team had taken "the low road to victory." According to the Times, one particular ad (above) had put her campaign over the edge into Karl Rove territory:
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs.…
April 26, 2008
The Pope is technically a head of state, so when he visits the US, why doesn't the news media spend more time asking him hard hitting questions about church policy and practice?
NPR's On the Media spotlighted that question last week (audio above) interviewing Tom Roberts, news director of The…
April 24, 2008
Following the AAAS meetings in February, I had this to say about the future of science and environmental journalism:
The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting with synthesis, analysis, personal narrative, and opinion. The goals will be to inform but also to persuade…
April 23, 2008
Earlier this week, I argued that a fundamental shift was needed in climate change communication strategy and that the shift meant refocusing news coverage on urban areas rather than arctic regions:
Climate change needs to be repackaged around core ideas and values that a majority of Americans…
April 23, 2008
The Center for Inquiry's Susan Jacoby, author of the NYTimes bestseller The Age of American Unreason, appeared last night on The Colbert Report.
As Colbert remarked, he prefers emotion over reason and when Jacoby noted that few Americans can correctly identify the nature of DNA, Colbert answered…
April 22, 2008
Few details are provided, but in a buzz-generating interview, here is what The Sun (UK) reports:
"The former US Vice President said: 'I will make a sequel to the 2006 documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' and despite earths 'rising fever', I am hopeful for a happy ending".
April 22, 2008
In his appearance last week on NPR Science Friday (audio), Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs framed the climate challenge not in terms of regulating pollution but rather as an energy and technology problem. Sachs brings an important moderating voice to the climate debate, offering a message that…
April 22, 2008
In an op-ed at the Seattle Times, communication scholars Dave Domke and Kevin Coe note the absurd God & Country tests that have been applied to Barack Obama, ranging from the "Give Praise to God" test to the "Flag Lapel Pin" test and most recently the "God Bless America" test.
As it turns out…
April 21, 2008
As I have argued in talks and articles over the past year, the communication challenge on global warming is to create the public opinion environment where meaningful policy action can take place. This means shaping public perceptions so that global warming is considered a top tier political…
April 21, 2008
Back in February, I traveled to Rome, Italy to present at a conference sponsored by Columbia University's Earth Institute and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation. The focus was on climate change and cities. For the proceedings on that conference, I was asked to contribute a short overview on the…
April 19, 2008
Despite record amounts of media attention and ever certain science about threats to the environment, Americans' commitment to taking environmentally sustainable actions remains little changed over the past eight years. In the first of their annual Earth Day survey reports, Gallup finds that only…
April 18, 2008
Back in the spring of 2006, Time magazine ran the cover at left warning Americans to "Be Worried, Be VERY Worried" about global warming. As I've written in different places (summary), this type of packaging for coverage of climate change is representative of the Pandora's Box frame of catastrophe…
April 17, 2008
In Expelled, Richard Dawkins recounts how learning about science "killed off" his faith. And PZ Myers tells us that the more science literacy we have in society, the less religion we will have, and the more science, resulting in a nice feedback loop.
Their comments reflect conventional wisdom…
April 17, 2008
On the eve of Expelled premiering in theaters across the country, Pew offers a wide ranging Q&A with Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project. The full interview is more than worth reading, but a particular exchange is revealing.
How can scientists - especially scientists who are…
April 17, 2008
In a recent analysis, Pew finds that news attention to Iraq has sharply declined since last year, overshadowed in coverage by the dominance of the Democratic primary race and the faltering economy. As Pew describes, from January 2007--when Bush announced the "surge"--through the end of May 2007,…
April 16, 2008
With Pope Benedict's visit to the United States this week, Gallup has released a survey measuring Americans views on various religious groups as well as atheists. Favorable perceptions of atheists are down 2% from 2006, though this variation falls within the margin of error for the two surveys.…
April 11, 2008
In a recent episode (podcast) of the CBC series "How to Think About Science," here's how Harvard historian of science Steven Shapin answers that question:
I believe of course that there are facts of the matter, independent of our culture, independent of our social order, independent of our…