Matthew Nisbet
Professor of Communication at Northeastern University.
nisbetmc
Posts by this author
January 16, 2007
In case you missed it, ScienceBlogs lit up last week with news that Federal Way school district in Seattle has banned Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, in part because the presentation conflicts with creationist views and does not depict a fiery End Times for the earth. (Go here, here, here, and here…
January 15, 2007
Bird flu is suddenly back in the news as officials in Indonesia report new cases this week. In a spring 2006 Skeptical Inquirer Online column, after evaluating trends in reporting and opinion polling, I offered this outlook on the nature of news coverage and its impact on public perceptions:…
January 15, 2007
Back in the fall, after hosting a class "blog" debate on the Internet and community, more than a few readers asked me whether I would post the reading list for the undergrad course I teach here at American University. Below is the schedule of readings assigned for the spring semester, along with a…
January 15, 2007
For those that have been following the debate over the recent Chronicle of Higher Ed rankings of top US research universities, the publication is currently hosting an interesting discussion with the creator of the index, anthropologist Lawrence B. Martin, former graduate dean at SUNY Stony Brook…
January 15, 2007
By far, the most successful buzz marketing campaign of the past decade has been Apple's ability to dominate news coverage with the release of their latest i-products. NPR's On the Media interviews Wired columnist Pete Mortenson on how Apple gets journalists and news organizations to do their PR…
January 15, 2007
Every Tuesday, the Project for Excellence in Journalism will be releasing their weekly news index report, an analysis that tracks the major stories across media sectors including daily newspapers, online news, network TV news, cable news, and radio. Last week was the first report for 2007.…
January 15, 2007
The same week Harvard unveiled its plans for a 250 acre Life Sciences campus, Scotland's University of Edinburgh announced a $115 million dollar Stem Cell Research Institute to be directed by Ian Wilmut. At universities across Europe, Asia, the US, and Canada, there's a race to be at the forefront…
January 15, 2007
As I predicted last week in my column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, opponents of the House stem cell bill are arguing that science advocates have hyped both the promise and the public demand for research, while recent studies show a "middle way" compromise where funding for new embryonic stem cell…
January 14, 2007
There's a reason why Harvard continues to dominate institutional rankings. While some universities spend $100s of millions of dollars on their athletic programs and athletic facilities, Harvard sinks its $30 billion endowment into a 250 acre life sciences campus. From the news wires:
CAMBRIDGE,…
January 14, 2007
The NY Times' Barnaby Feder offers this report on the City of Berkeley's decision to regulate nanotechnology locally. As this research area moves more and more into the market, and especially into overtly political contexts like city councils, state legislatures, and Congress, the issue will…
January 14, 2007
You can debate the validity of these metrics endlessly. You can question whether citations and pubs are the best indicators of university quality and impact, and you can deliberate over whether or not the social sciences and humanities should be evaluated using metrics grounded in a physical…
January 14, 2007
Apparently, Dinesh D'Souza, who has been embarrassing himself with wanna-be-academic bomb throwing books for years, has finally thoroughly discredited himself. A fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute, D'Souza in his latest work The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11,…
January 14, 2007
In a fall 2007 bond proposal, incoming Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Lt. Gov. David Paterson are hoping to sell voters on spending up to $2 billion over 10 years to promote advances and economic development through research on stem cells and in other life sciences (Gannett News Service).
Back in 2005, a…
January 13, 2007
A battle appears to be brewing in Texas over the proposed Presidential library at SMU:
DALLAS - Negotiations to build George W. Bush's presidential library at Southern Methodist University have divided the campus, pitting the administration and some alumni against liberal-leaning faculty members…
January 12, 2007
What was the impact of Bush's Iraq speech? Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has an excellent round up of media and pundit reaction to the president's primetime TV appearance. Meanwhile, ABC News and CBS News have posted revealing results from overnight polls.
Yet the most entertaining, if not…
January 11, 2007
In the Senate, stem cell proponents figure that they have 66 to 67 votes lined up in support of the funding bill passed today in the House. As I previously noted, a number of options are on the table to overcome an anticipated Bush veto of the bill, but where does public opinion stand on the…
January 11, 2007
This afternoon, as expected, the House passed the stem cell funding bill, 253 to 174, falling well short of the 290 votes needed to overturn a Bush veto. Debate now moves to the Senate, where news reports peg support teetering right at the 2/3 majority needed in the chamber to override the…
January 10, 2007
Over at the Huffington Post, David Roberts concedes my point about why the Pandora's Box frame of looming catastrophe may not be the best way to communicate the urgency of climate change. Yet he disagrees that environmental advocates should be concerned about opening themselves up to claims of "…
January 10, 2007
Despite my misgivings about the vast commercialization of college athletics, and its impact on university culture, I did tune in to at least parts of Monday night's BCS championship game. Just in case you were one of the 20 million or so viewers wondering how star OSU receiver Ted Ginn might have…
January 8, 2007
As a follow up to a previous post, NPR runs this story on the use of "surge" to describe the Administration's plan for more of the same in Iraq, featuring an interview with linguist Deborah Tannen.
Earlier this week, CNN's Jack Cafferty called the Administration's bluff, describing the use of "…
January 8, 2007
As I predicted, stem cell opponents have issued a press release "pleading" with Dems to hold off on a stem cell bill in light of the Nature Biotechnology study on amniotic stem cells:
Christian Groups Urge Pelosi to Hold Off Embryonic Stem Cell Bills Based on New Scientific Discovery
A growing…
January 8, 2007
The Washington Post has these details on the problems House Dems face as they juggle Iraq with the agenda items of stem cell research, minimum wage, and other domestic issues.
January 8, 2007
In an article fronting today's Washington Post, Rick Weiss gives us a preview of the rhetorical struggle that is sure to be part of this week's House stem cell debate, namely the efforts by research opponents to spin the amniotic stem cell study as a "middle way" compromise solution to overturning…
January 8, 2007
After spending the past three years on the faculty at Ohio State, I remain ambivalent about the vast commercialization and big time money pouring into college athletics. Of course, it will all be on stage tonight as OSU takes on Florida in the BCS championship game.
As USA Today spotlighted last…
January 8, 2007
This week all eyes will be on Capitol Hill as Nancy Pelosi and the newly elected House majority push for stem cell legislation that would override President George W. Bush's tight limits on research funding. Supporters will need to achieve a super majority in both houses in order to stave off a…
January 7, 2007
Think Progress has the video of Sunday's speculation at ABC News This Week that newly elected Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi may appoint a special committee on global warming. Watch it here.
January 5, 2007
Gallup just released the latest in their trends on news consumption patterns. There's a lot to debate about these poll measures, but they do provide one indicator among many about what might be going on with audiences. In fact, these numbers are best compared for reliability against the annual…
January 5, 2007
Haven't heard of Second Life? It's a 3-D virtual world built by users or "residents" worldwide. Imagine the video game World of Warcraft, but no game, just a cyber-community evolving in ways both similar and different from the real world.
The best way for me to describe Second Life is if you…
January 3, 2007
Part 1 of Segment
Part 2 of Segment
Stay the Course versus Cut and Run versus Surge and Accelerate. Over the past month, as the Bush team has unpacked its new language of "surge and accelerate," they have successfully shifted the terms of discussion away from troop withdrawal and a timeline…
January 3, 2007
In case you were wondering, why in an era of extreme media fragmentation, polls show that Republicans rank global warming as less of a priority than flag burning or the estate tax (Pew 2006, slide #22), the following comes my way via the email updates from the Center for American Progress and…