FRAME: Middle/Third Way
nisbetmc | January 15, 2008
Conventional wisdom pegs 2007 as the long awaited tipping point in waking the American public up to the urgency of global warming. Yet as I review in my latest "Science and the Media" column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, such optimism runs up against the reality of public opinion.
Despite Gore's breakthrough success with Inconvenient Truth, American opinion today is little different from when the film premiered in May 2006. Gore has done a very good job of intensifying the beliefs of audiences who were already concerned about climate change, but a deep perceptual divide between partisans…
nisbetmc | December 21, 2007A X-Mas Goracle
In an editorial in the latest issue of the journal Climatic Change, Simon Donner argues that scientists need to join with religious leaders in communicating the urgency of climate change. Donner is an assistant professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on climate change, coral reefs, and nutrient cycling.
Following the lead of older avant-garde communicators such as Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and EO Wilson, Donner is one of many among a new generation of scientists who recognize that a paradigm shift is needed for engaging the…
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, 2007James Thomson w/ Ian Wilmut (seated)
What happens politically when the two scientists most widely associated with therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research appear to abandon cloning and embryo extraction for a procedure that involves non-controversial sources of pluripotent cells? It signals perhaps the end of a grand Congressional coalition that has put aside partisan differences to work in support of expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research. It also likely marks the end to the hyper-competitive race among states to fund their own research.
Today, the journals Science…
nisbetmc | June 12, 2007Yesterday, stem cell researcher John Gearhart, Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss, and physician William Hurlburt appeared on NPR's Diane Rehm Show to discuss the latest in the stem cell debate. I recommend listening to the archived audio as the program provides a great deal of context in understanding last week's events and the debate in general. Of interest to my post yesterday, both Gearhart and Weiss say that they think the timing of the skin stem cell studies were nothing more than coincidence.
(In other speculation, over at the Sandwalk blog, one commentator reports that the timing…
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 | 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.
nisbetmc | April 17, 2007The Discovery Institute have a blog post up commenting on our WPost Outlook article.
Given this latest response to our Framing Science thesis, I wanted to take time out from an incredibly busy week to once again describe framing and its implications for successful science communication.
As I have noted and Coturnix so eloquently describes, in the process of communication, you can't avoid framing. Scientists do it all the time in lab talk, in conference papers, in powerpoints, in journal articles, and in grant applications.
However, as the communication process passes to science writers…
nisbetmc | March 26, 2007
As I've noted, in places like Canada and Europe, nuclear energy has been successfully reframed as an important "middle way" compromise solution in the debate over what to do about global warming. Now a report out today from the Oxford Research Group casts doubt on the potential of nuclear. From Reuters:
The surge in political popularity of nuclear power as a quick-fix, zero-carbon solution to global warming is misguided and potentially highly dangerous, a group of academics and scientists said on Monday. In its report "Secure energy, civil nuclear power, security and global warming", the…
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 | January 18, 2007In the days before the House vote to fund embryonic stem cell research, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times ran page one stories heralding a Nature Biotech study that indicated stem cells extracted from amniotic fluid might have "near pluripotent" like properties. Yet, despite the heavy attention from its competitive rivals, the New York Times was silent on the study. (For a full roundup.)
Not soon after the front page headlines appeared, as I predicted, the White House and various anti-abortion groups jumped on the study to claimed that it offered an important "middle way." Given the…
nisbetmc | January 15, 2007As 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 lines is not needed. Consider, for example, this column by Yuval Levin at the Weekly Standard.
Meanwhile, the Bush White House, in a 67 page report strategically framed as "Advancing Stem Cell Science Without Destroying Human Life," argues that the latest adult stem cell studies make embryonic…
nisbetmc | January 8, 2007In 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 Bush's flawed stem cell policy.
Atala and other scientists emphasized that they don't believe the cells will make embryonic stem cells irrelevant. "There's not going to be one shoe that fits all," said Robert Lanza, scientific director at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. "We're going to…
nisbetmc | 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 Bush veto. The Center for American Progress estimates that backers of the bill might be as many as 40 votes shy of a 2/3 majority in the House, but perhaps only one vote shy in the Senate.
Both sides in the debate are geared up for a major political communication battle, and in a new "Science and…