Enviro/Science Reporting
nisbetmc | February 1, 2008Blogs are already a central feature of mainstream news sites and their importance is only likely to grow. Just take a scan at the reporting, analysis, and commentary available at NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com.
So the question is...how long will it be until the Pulitzer prize committee recognizes the outstanding contributions of this major new outlet for "print" journalism?
And let me help begin the debate over inaugural winners. If there is a leading candidate, it's Andrew Revkin's work at the NY Times' DotEarth. Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Revkin launched the blog last year…
nisbetmc | January 22, 2008Tomorrow, I will be appearing on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi show for a segment called "A bi-partisan approach to environmentalism." The show starts at noon EST and you can listen live or to the audio archive here. I will post more details on the other guests when they become available. To preview my take on the environmental agenda in the 2008 election, see my recent column on "Going Beyond Gore's Message."
Late last year I appeared on the same program to discuss science policy and communication. Listen here.
nisbetmc | January 15, 2008The Columbia Journalism Review has formally launched a department dedicated to science and environmental reporting. Curtis Brainard, who has been covering the beat at CJR, will be chief reporter. His first online article details the problems and challenges ScienceDebate 2008 faces in gaining news coverage and public attention.
From the announcement about the new CJR dept:
The Observatory will monitor science journalism-covering the coverage-with an eye toward improving the journalism and thereby improving the discourse. It will be a guide to the best and worst of science and environmental…
nisbetmc | January 6, 2008
James Watson outrageously suggested that Africans were genetically inferior.
If race is a biological fiction, what are the reasons for persistent belief in this social myth? My colleague Tim Caulfield, Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, points to research that shows genetic differences can more accurately be called "genographic variations," and only roughly correspond to the visible characteristics we have come to identify with categories of "races" such as black, white, or asian.
In a must-read op-ed appearing at the Edmonton Journal and other papers across…
nisbetmc | November 21, 2007Conservatives are promoting Bush as the biomedical Atticus Finch. Shown here posing with a "snowflake" baby, adopted and born from left over in vitro clinic embryos.
Some collected thoughts on what the stem cell discovery means for the framing of the debate, trends in news coverage and public opinion:
---->As I wrote yesterday, perhaps the biggest impact on the framing of the stem cell debate is to inject a booster shot of resonance to conservative claims that pursuing embryonic stem cell research is not necessary and that we can gain everything we need from morally unproblematic adult…
nisbetmc | November 20, 2007
At the Columbia Journalism Review, managing editor Brent Cunningham argues for a new journalistic beat that covers the obscuring uses of language and messaging in politics. The essay is part of a special issue devoted to "Orwell in '08."
The benefits of a "rhetoric and framing" beat would be obvious and sorely needed, as he asks:
What if on 9/11 our major media outlets had employed reporters whose sole job it was to cover the rhetoric of politics--to parse the language of our elected leaders, challenge it, and explain the thinking behind it, the potential power it can have to legitimize…
nisbetmc | September 16, 2007
In a cover story at this week's NY Times magazine, Gary Taubes digs deep into the world of epidemiological research on diet and health. It's an important topic to call attention to, but the article is framed in disastrous and irresponsible ways.
Instead of telling a detective story hung around just how amazingly complex it is to figure out the linkages between diet, drug therapies, and human health, Taubes and his editors go the unfortunate route of defining the article in terms of conflict, drama, and public accountability.
They readily translate their preferred interpretation by way…
nisbetmc | September 12, 2007 Ira Flatow has a new book out chronicling his award winning interviews at NPR's Science Friday. Flatow appeared on NPR's Diane Rehm show yesterday to talk about Present at the Future and his experience as host of Science Friday.
nisbetmc | August 22, 2007
Pew has released an extensive analysis by political scientist Michael Robinson of three decades of its news consumption data. Among the key findings, since the 1980s, the percentage of the public who say they follow news about science and technology "very closely" has dropped by half, from roughly 30% during the 1980s to roughly 15% today. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who say they follow personalities and entertainment has doubled to 17%, while the proportion paying very close attention to terrorism/war; bad weather; and money top all issues, with each at 40% respectively.
In a…
nisbetmc | July 31, 2007Last week I posted on the "Misunderstood Meanings of Science Literacy," noting that scientists, policymakers, and journalists tend to narrowly focus on the recall of facts about science as the most important dimension of knowledge. Usually this dimension of knowledge is tested in quiz like survey questions.
In the paper's monthly Education section, the NY Times provides just such an example, asking several scientists to provide questions for readers.
Yet why is the most important thing to know about climate change defined exclusively in terms of science? Why not ask experts who study the…
nisbetmc | July 31, 2007
In journalism, professional norms favor telling gripping stories about individuals and places. Applied to the debate over global warming, many journalists believe that if they can recast the complex issue in terms of familiar characters and local places, they can activate greater public concern and understanding.
Yet it remains important that these individual stories are embedded within more thematic presentations that focus on broader climate trends and impacts. It's also important that individual stories about citizens who are taking action also provide context for how even greater…
nisbetmc | June 30, 2007Chris Mooney's Storm World is reviewed in Sunday's edition of the NY Times, a major moment for any author since the attention will surely give a major boost to the book's profile and sales. Indeed, to date, the buzz about Chris' new book has been glowing.
(Full Disclosure: Currently on a joint speaking tour with Chris, I have first hand experience with the growing buzz. I've been in rooms where climate scientists have been lining up to have Chris autograph multiple copies of his book.)
But don't take my word for it, consider the evidence: The Boston Globe called his tale of the science…
nisbetmc | June 30, 2007I'm obviously a bit late in commenting on the scientist-journalist debate that went on through last week, so I'm not going to weigh in at this point. (Round up of posts. The entry that started it all.)
But for the motivated reader, below the fold are listed several studies and book chapters that I assign in my course on Science, Media, and the Public or that I recommend to graduate students doing research on the topic. All of the sources are available at your university library and provide useful context for understanding the interactions between scientists and journalists.
Moreover, at…
nisbetmc | June 27, 2007
The news frenzy over Andrew Speaker, the honeymooning lawyer with a rare strain of anti-biotic resistant TB, did little to shape public views on the disease as a global health problem. Though top news outlets such as the NYTimes and NPR used the focusing event as a news peg to provide more thematic and contextual coverage of the TB epidemic, the news organizations where most Americans get their news-- including local TV news, cable, and soft/celebrity news outlets--portrayed the event mostly in human interest terms.
Not surprisingly, in a poll released this week, Gallup finds the following…
nisbetmc | June 12, 2007
As we argue in the Nisbet & Mooney Framing Science thesis, one reason that traditional science communication efforts fail to reach the wider American public is that the media tend to feed on the soft news preferences of the mass audience, making it very easy for citizens who lack a strong interest in public affairs or science coverage to completely avoid such content and instead pay only close attention to infotainment sagas.
As a result, climate change, despite receiving record amounts of media attention historically, still routinely fails to crack the top 10 news stories, as tracked by…
nisbetmc | June 11, 2007Consider the following events, their political timing, and their impact on the framing of the stem cell debate:
1) Last week, as the House was preparing to vote on legislation that would overturn Bush's limits on funding for embryonic stem cell research, studies published at the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell reported that mouse skin stem cells could be turned into a pluripotent stem cell with all the characteristics of an embryonic stem cell. Coverage of the studies appeared on the front page of the Washington Post and other newspapers across the country.
Though the research teams…
nisbetmc | June 4, 2007
Imagine for the moment a classic work of modern art as pictured above. When a curator takes a heavy and bulky wooden frame, places it around the complex and uncertain image, a viewers' eyes are drawn to certain dimensions of that painting over others, perhaps leading to a specific interpretation of the artist's intent or even a specific emotional reaction.
If a second curator replaces that bulky wooden frame with a much lighter metallic one, a viewer's gaze might be drawn immediately to other aspects of the painting, potentially altering the interpretation of the artist's intended meaning…
nisbetmc | May 29, 2007In a letter published at Science, Cornell University professors and media relations staff offer their recommendations on media training training for scientists.
The recommendations are based on a media relations course for graduate students taught as part of the Biogeochemistry and Environmental Biocomplexity program.
Below are some specifics:
Currently, most communication training for scientists begins after a prominent scientific discovery, and the training often occurs in a trial-by-fire style. However, a cultural shift is under way, reflecting the higher stakes of research, and an…
nisbetmc | May 25, 2007The NY Times' Andrew Revkin details a study at Nature that finds that in the Caribbean there have been centuries where strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today. Revkin reports that although the new study does not necessarily conflict with other recent research connecting global warming to more intense hurricanes, it does show that factors other than ocean temperatures can shape trends in the power of storms.
Revkin quotes climate scientist Judith Curry, ending the article with an important focus on the policy implications of…
nisbetmc | May 7, 2007With the semester finally winding down, over the weekend, I updated the tabs "What is Framing?" and "Popular Science vs. Framing." These new sections of my blog explain in detail research on framing and media influence and also present a generalizable typology of frames that re-appear across science debates. Both tabs include bibliographies of recommended literature.