nisbetmc | 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 as these most recent surveys come out. I was interested in doing the study because, despite the availability of dozens of survey studies over the past two decades, no authoritative summary of their collective findings exists. As a consequence, survey results often become an ideological Rorschach…
nisbetmc | 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 next ten years.
Yet, relative to perceptions of this climate impact there remain major partisan differences. According to the survey, 83% of Democrats worry that hurricanes will become more powerful due to global warming compared to only 49% of Republicans.
nisbetmc | 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 as news organizations (think Fox News.)
Attack so-called liberal economists and scientists, and launch your own rival think tank science. Think trickle-down economics, intelligent-design creationism, and climate skepticism....
And now, conservatives attack the "liberal" knowledge collaboratively…
nisbetmc | 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 communication at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Anti-Americanism abroad and Islamophobia in the U.S, topics he tracks at Framing Conflict.
Here are just a few highlights from recent posts:
Can hip-hop be used as a tool for cultural diplomacy?
Obama bin laden: Will Islamo-phobia be a…
nisbetmc | March 12, 2007The 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 imagination. In a neat piece of marketing, the Canadian Ice Service made available a stunning image to coincide with the IPCC report. Two bears, probably a mother and her cub, are pictured on a spectacular ice block off northern Alaska that might have been modelled by Henry Moore. They appear to be…
nisbetmc | March 12, 2007Over 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 member is a "cognitive miser." Faced with an extraordinary amount of issues to track on a daily basis, it is actually quite reasonable for citizens to rely heavily on short cuts such as values and media frames to reach a decision about a policy debate. This natural human tendency leads to a complex…
nisbetmc | 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 dismissed by conservative interest groups like Fox News, with calls to ban the the Discovery Channel program because it might be "deeply offensive to Christians" (see the clip above).
What's really at issue is the statistical estimate by UToronto's Andrey Feuerverger that there is only "a one in…
nisbetmc | 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 out of the news audience, paying almost exclusive attention to celebrity culture, entertainment, sports, or other diversionary topics. The challenge then is to think about angles on an issue like climate change that generate coverage in a non-traditional beat like the sports pages, thereby…
nisbetmc | 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 market is good news for everybody.
nisbetmc | March 6, 2007Over 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 take on the road as part of a national speaking tour. Stay tuned for more details.
nisbetmc | March 4, 2007Back 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 problem.
Indeed, with CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Peter A. Darbee of PG&E offering up a plan that would lead to a 20 to 40 percent reduction in current levels of global warming pollutants by 2050, it was time for long time opponents of action to regroup and reassess their…
nisbetmc | 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 credibility, a theme that the GOP has long used against Democratic candidates like John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton.
As an example of the self-inflicted wounds that GOP candidates are scoring, consider John McCain. I like the Arizona Senator, and I admire his leadership on climate change, but you have…
nisbetmc | March 2, 2007In 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's Box of unknown disaster in the 1970s. These frames were locked in by the Three Mile Island accident in 1977, and reinforced in the 1980s by the Chernobyl disaster. Since TMI, no new nuclear reactors have been built in the U.S., and public support for nuclear energy has never moved above 50%.
Yet…
nisbetmc | March 1, 2007The 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 Eddie Goldenberg, a former party policy advisor, that at the time, Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretian committed the country to Kyoto fully expecting to fall short of the targets. Here's how the Globe and Mail reported the comments:
"I am not sure that Canadian public opinion -- which was…
nisbetmc | March 1, 2007War 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 lead to distortion, canvassing over nuance and complexity. In a recent issue of New Scientist, they feature the voices of some of these critics of the "war" metaphor, and link to some useful resources on the long history of its use in science and medicine.
nisbetmc | 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 increasingly limited returns.
Instead, as I describe in my latest "Science and the Media" column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, other public engagement methods are sorely needed. Among options, I suggest reaching the wider public not directly via news coverage, but rather indirectly by way of a "two-step…
nisbetmc | 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 research director at the University of Alberta's Health Law Institute, wondered whether all the knee-jerk policy activity sparked by the event was really worth the fuss.
For example, the UN spent three years negotiating an international ban on human cloning, only to settle on an ambiguous non-binding…
nisbetmc | 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 many content choices. In a fragmented media system, strong "preference gaps" exist, as citizens not only select among media choices based on ideology or religious views, but also based on their preference, or lack thereof, for science-related content. As a result, with a wide diversity of…
nisbetmc | February 20, 2007The 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 analysis for the top most covered stories at the major news outlets over the last five weeks, as indexed by Pew.
1. Iraq Policy Debate - 12%
2. Events in Iraq - 10%3. Anna Nicole Smith Dies - 9%
4. Campaign 2008 - 8%5. Astronaut Scandal - 6%
6. Severe Weather - 3%
7. Super Bowl - 3%
8. Libby Trial - 3…
nisbetmc | 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 in the history of the world except those who have suffered economic collapse, such as Russia. Canadians do not want empty promises on a plan that we cannot achieve and they do not want our country to face economic collapse."
This kind of "economic ruin" and "unfair burden" frame has long been used…