Matthew Nisbet
Professor of Communication at Northeastern University.
nisbetmc
Posts by this author
March 14, 2007
As Earth Day approaches, expect a number of major polling reports on American views of global warming. I recently had a study accepted at Public Opinion Quarterly that analyzes twenty years of available polling trends on global warming, and I will be updating the analysis in the next two weeks…
March 12, 2007
The next hurricane season is only a few months away, and when it comes to the possible link between global warming and more intense storms, according to a just released Gallup poll, roughly half of Americans think hurricanes have already become more powerful due to global warming or will in the…
March 12, 2007
When knowledge challenges values or cuts against preferred policies, you attack the messenger, and then invent your own rival knowledge. That's been the playbook for the conservative movement over the past thirty years.
Attack the so-called "liberal" media and launch interest groups masquerading…
March 12, 2007
Update your RSS feeds, there's a major new blog on the scene that is worth reading. Framing Conflict was launched a few months back, with a focus on the media's role in shaping international conflict. The blog is authored by my brother Erik, who is finishing up his doctoral work in political…
March 12, 2007
The Guardian has the details on the PR tactic of polar bear photos to (over)dramatize the impacts of global warming, tracing the idea to a 1993 Coca-Cola campaign. Here's a little bit about the strategic use of "cuddly anthropomorphism on the tundra":
One photograph in particular has captured the…
March 12, 2007
Last week's Discovery Channel documentary on Jesus' family tomb represents a leading example of how science, journalism, and theology often arrive at different answers based on competing assumptions, incentives, and imperatives.
Disregard for the moment how this important debate was immediately…
March 12, 2007
Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney elaborates on a recent post to his blog that hits on many of the themes first explored at Framing Science, as well as in several of my recent studies (here and here) and lectures.
There's a basic paradox worth noting. As I've often described, every audience…
March 9, 2007
In a fragmented media system, not only do people choose among news outlets and stories based on their ideology and partisanship, but also based on their preference, or lack thereof, for public affairs-related content. It is very easy for the majority of the public to completely select themselves…
March 6, 2007
NPR's On the Media runs this week an excellent feature questioning why stock market downturns end up being the top story everywhere in the media. Media preoccupation with Wall Street, not only likely distracts us from other more important economic news, but mistakenly assumes that a rising stock…
March 6, 2007
Over at The Intersection, my friend and colleague Chris Mooney has more thoughts on why the IPCC report failed to impact the wider media and public agenda. Mooney is in Vancouver this week, presenting at the University of British Columbia, sharing thoughts and ideas that together we are likely to…
March 4, 2007
Back in January, when a coalition of Big Industry CEOs and environmental groups got together to urge Congress and the President to pass "cap and trade" legislation on global warming pollutants, a sudden crack appeared in the long standing conservative opposition to major policy action on the…
March 2, 2007
With their short term focus on the state primaries, GOP candidates are jockeying for favor from the right wing of the Republican party, and somewhere Democratic strategists are probably smiling.
It all adds up to major framing ammo for the general election, especially on the dimension of…
March 2, 2007
In a column last year, I detailed the historical trajectory in the U.S. of frames on nuclear energy, with images moving from very positive interpretations centered on social progress and economic development during the 1950s and 1960s to a very negative focus on public accountability and a Pandora'…
March 1, 2007
The Golden Rule in politics is never promise something you can't deliver. In 1997 Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol and committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12, yet emissions today are now more than 30% above the target. Last week, it was claimed by…
March 1, 2007
War metaphors have long been employed in science, ranging from the "War on Cancer" to the "War on Science" itself. These frame devices help draw attention to an issue, and dramatize for the public why a science-related topic might matter, but many scientists have long worried that they ultimately…
February 27, 2007
As I've chronicled at this blog, the IPCC report was a massive failure as a communication moment. The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the wider public about the urgency of climate change is just more evidence that relying on traditional science communication strategies has…
February 25, 2007
Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the announcement of the cloned sheep Dolly. While the U.S. press largely passed on the moment, the Canadian and British media paid much heavier attention. In an op-ed at Canada's Globe & Mail, my friend Tim Caulfied, a professor of law and…
February 25, 2007
One of the great paradoxes of contemporary society is that Americans by way of the Internet and specialized cable TV channels have greater access to scientific information than at any other time in history, yet knowledge of science and related policy matters remains very low. The problem is too…
February 20, 2007
The major news organizations, especially the big three cable news networks, need a crash courses in ethics. Given all the major issues taking place in the world, how can they continue to pander to the American public's most base instincts with 24 hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith?
Witness the…
February 20, 2007
Where have you heard this one before? Back in September, Canada's Environment Minister John Baird echoed the predictions of a university economist when he claimed that if Canada were to meet its's 2008-12 Kyoto targets, it would require "a rate of emissions decline unmatched by any modern nation…
February 16, 2007
In the week following the Friday, Feb. 2 release of the Fourth IPCC report on global climate change, few if any Americans reported that global warming was the issue they were following most closely. Instead, the public turned its gaze back to the war in Iraq, while others, especially women ages…
February 14, 2007
At the beginning of the spring semester, I noted that the Political Communication Seminar at the University of Virginia and the English 12 course at UNC-Chapel Hill were making use of blogs in their course work, and were using Framing Science as a shining example!
Here at American University, the…
February 14, 2007
Irony can be an effective persuasion tool. As pictured on the Drudge Report this morning with the headline: HEARING ON 'WARMING OF PLANET' CANCELED BECAUSE OF ICE STORM. The headline links to a Drudge posted press release, likely sent his way by staffers in the James Inhofe "Big Oil" wing of the…
February 13, 2007
Where once it was the province of against-the-establishment rebels and citizen media types, major institutions are now taking wide advantage of blogging technology to promote their message or to expand their audience. And it's not just major media outlets like the Washington Post or the NY Times…
February 13, 2007
Just how tough is it to sustain news and thereby public attention to the problem of global warming? Exhibit A: The week after the release of the IPCC report, the issue failed to even crack the top five news stories of the week, as tracked by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. The…
February 11, 2007
Though they may appear very simple, intensive time and effort goes into plotting the jacket covers for intended blockbuster novels like Michael Crichton's Next. Today's backpage essay at the NY Times Book Review describes how over the past 30 years a whole design style has sprung up called "the…
February 10, 2007
A series of concerts "bigger than Live Aid" are being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before a global audience of two billion, reports the Financial Times. The event, scheduled for July 7, will feature co-ordinated film, music and television events in seven cities…
February 9, 2007
Declaring that framing should be a central strategy, Ellen Goodman in today's syndicated Boston Globe column issues a call to arms on climate change: "Can we change from debating global warming to preparing? Can we define the issue in ways that turn denial into action? In America what matters now…
February 7, 2007
How much impact has Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth had on the global warming debate? More generally, how can we understand the range of influences that a documentary film might have on the public or on policy? I address these questions and others in the introduction to a recent report published by…
February 6, 2007
Last week, global warming cracked the top 5 news stories at Pew's media attention index, but only accounted for roughly 5% of the total news hole across outlets, dwarfed by the roughly 40% of news attention captured by the combined issues of Iraq, Iran, and the 2008 Presidential horserace.