nisbetmc | April 28, 2008Dallas 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…
nisbetmc | 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. In attendance was what appeared to be the typical urban professional crowd for the surrounding arts and entertainment district, an audience on a Sunday that is more likely to read the New York Times at a coffee house than to attend church.
As I watched the film, I noticed how effectively Expelled…
At the NYTimes and the WSJ, Just 2% of Front Page Stories Focus on Either Science or the Environment
nisbetmc | 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, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are the papers of record for the country. The stories that they run on the front page are typically the lead stories across other news organizations including public radio, weekly magazines, regional newspapers and TV and cable news. If our highest quality…
nisbetmc | 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. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad -- torn right from Karl Rove's playbook -- evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. "If…
nisbetmc | 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 National Catholic Reporter. Here's the crux of the problem as Roberts sees it.
TOM ROBERTS: They're dealing with a basically secret organization. It makes its decisions in secret, its appointments in secret. There's no precedent for a real robust exchange. You don't even have that with bishops in the…
nisbetmc | 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 and to mobilize...However, the new forms, modes, style, and sponsors for science coverage will mean that journalists will have to rethink their standard orientations and definitions of objectivity and balance. The future is already here, it's time to talk about what it all means.
This week's Time…
nisbetmc | April 23, 2008Earlier 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 already care about. This means shifting the public lens away from distant arctic regions, socially remote people and places, or consequences far off in the future, and instead recasting climate change as an urban problem with local impacts and solutions.
Now comes this report from Cristine Russell at…
nisbetmc | 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: "A fraud perpetuated by science in order to make us not believe in God!" The segment is classic satire.
But Jacoby's appearance on Colbert does prompt the serious question: to what degree do shows such as the Daily Show and The Colbert Report contribute to the age of unreason, with younger viewers…
nisbetmc | April 22, 2008Few 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".
nisbetmc | April 22, 2008In 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 goes beyond the polarized rhetoric of conservatives and many environmentalists.
Sachs appeared on the show to talk about his new book "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet." Early in the interview, he was asked by host Ira Flatow about the common argument against taking action on climate…
nisbetmc | April 22, 2008In 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, the tradition of saying "God Bless America" by political leaders is a manufactured illusion that has been turned into a patriotic sales pitch, only dating to Ronald Reagan and applied strategically in the post-9/11 Bush presidency.
Here's what Domke and Coe report:
Consider this reality: The…
nisbetmc | 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 priority.
Until Congressional members start to see the issue showing up in polls as a perceived priority and until they start to hear more of a diverse public voice on the matter, Congress will have little incentive to make the tough political choices and trade-offs that are needed.
The communication…
nisbetmc | April 21, 2008Back 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 communication challenge surrounding climate change and the connection to urban areas and populations. Below I have pasted a first draft of that contribution, as I conclude:
Solving the public opinion challenge means defining the complexities of climate change in a way that connects to the specific core…
nisbetmc | 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 28% of Americans say that they have made major changes in their lifestyles to protect the environment. This proportion is little changed over the 31% in 2000.
As for the actions that Americans' consider major lifestyle changes, a strong plurality (39%) report the relatively simple activity of…
nisbetmc | 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.
By focusing in on specific dramatic environmental impacts such as melting polar ice, sea level rise, the threat to polar bears, or the possibility of more intense hurricanes, advocates and journalists seek to dramatize a technical issue and provoke public concern and attention. As Ellen Goodman…
nisbetmc | April 17, 2008In 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 among atheists that the more you learn about science, the less religious you will become. In fact, it's the working assumption as to why in comparison to the American public, scientists are less likely to be religious.
But as I have mentioned in several comment threads, it turns out that the linear…
nisbetmc | April 17, 2008On 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 religious believers, like yourself - do a better job of reaching out to these people and convincing them that these findings are not a threat to their faith?
That's a very difficult challenge. And I don't think we should underestimate just how threatening it is to someone who has been raised in a…
nisbetmc | 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, Iraq had been the dominant story, accounting for 20% of all the news coverage measured by Pew's News Coverage Index. But from the time of that May funding vote through the war's fifth anniversary on March 19, 2008, coverage plunged by about 50 %. In that period, the media paid more than twice as much…
nisbetmc | 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. Overall, favorable perceptions of all religious groups are down, perhaps a sign of the kind of growing intolerance for outgroups or dissimilar others that occurs during times of economic hardship. For example the increased negativity towards Muslims detailed below is a classic "scapegoat" indicator.…
nisbetmc | April 11, 2008In 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 language, but I believe that at the same time when we make statements of fact, those statements of fact, belong to our culture. So I believe completely that there is a world independent of our thoughts, but when we start to represent that world, we are talking about cultural entities, what else could they…