Issue Attention Cycles
nisbetmc | February 23, 2009Shankar Vendantam's story headlined "Climate Fears Are Driving 'Ecomigration' Across the Globe" runs on the front page at the Washington Post today. It's not often that climate change is a front-pager at the NY Times or the WPost, making it important to understand the types of narratives that prompt editors to give the issue top attention.
For example, in January 2006, Andrew Revkin's report that NASA political appointees were blocking James Hansen's ability to make public statements ran as the lead story of the Sunday NY Times. For Times' editors, who earned their stripes covering politics…
nisbetmc | June 4, 2008
If the author is skeptical of mainstream science, is there a conservative think tank behind them?
A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge…
nisbetmc | May 22, 2008
An artist's take on the "scary wonder" of nanotechnology.
The asbestos of tomorrow? As we wrote in our article last year at The Scientist, that's not the type of frame device that augurs well for public perceptions of nanotechnology. But it's exactly the perceptual lens by which the New York Times covers a new study appearing this week at Nature Nanotechnology. As Kenneth Chang opens the article, setting the train of thought for readers:
Nanotubes, one of the wonder materials of the new age of nanotechnology, may carry a health risk similar to that of asbestos, a wonder material of an…
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 | March 17, 2008Pew has released its annual "State of the Media" report with detailed summaries of their content analysis on each sector of the news media. I will be blogging about this report over the next couple of weeks, but for now, consider one of the more interesting findings from the analysis of cable news coverage, a finding that underscores the problem of choice for news audiences I have detailed on this blog before. Based on their analysis of the combined year long content at the cable news outlets, Pew concludes:
Collectively, the broad range of domestic issues including the environment,…
nisbetmc | December 19, 2007
Pew has released its annual analysis of the top 20 most followed news stories of the year by the public. Pew pairs the survey data with a summary of their weekly news agenda tracking. For regular readers of this blog, you should not be surprised that climate change fails to crack the top 20 most followed issues or the top 20 most covered topics of 2007. (See previous posts here, and here.)
Several issues appear in the top 20 agenda items that are incidental to climate change including gas prices, periodic heat or cold waves, wild fires, and even the economy. In terms of effective public…
nisbetmc | June 14, 2007
With action on Iraq and major domestic initiatives such as immigration stalled, Congressional Dems have lost the sense of approval and optimism that greeted them in January. The gap in public approval, according to a recent Pew poll, has reached 15 percentage points.
Action on climate change and stem cell research were also part of the Dems' promised package of policies to put in place this year. Unfortunately, it looks like the juggernaut issues of Iraq, immigration, the 2008 Horse Race, and a growing number of oversight investigations will derail any meaningful science policy until…
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 | 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 | 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 -…
nisbetmc | February 16, 2007
In the week following the Friday, Feb. 2 release of the Fourth IPCC report on global climate change, few if any Americans reported that global warming was the issue they were following most closely. Instead, the public turned its gaze back to the war in Iraq, while others, especially women ages 18 to 29, were distracted by the media frenzy over the death of Anna Nicole Smith. The trends are reported in the first release of Pew's media interest index, an innovative new project matching audience data to weekly content analyses of the top news stories.
Things were only marginally different…
nisbetmc | February 13, 2007
Just how tough is it to sustain news and thereby public attention to the problem of global warming? Exhibit A: The week after the release of the IPCC report, the issue failed to even crack the top five news stories of the week, as tracked by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. The death of Anna Nicole Smith and the murder plot involving a love triangle of astronauts bumped climate change from top five news agenda status.
Even this week, as shareholders organize to demand companies address the problem; British PM Tony Blair announces that he is focusing the remaining months of his…
nisbetmc | February 6, 2007
Last week, global warming cracked the top 5 news stories at Pew's media attention index, but only accounted for roughly 5% of the total news hole across outlets, dwarfed by the roughly 40% of news attention captured by the combined issues of Iraq, Iran, and the 2008 Presidential horserace.
nisbetmc | February 1, 2007
GRAPH: MAJOR NEWSPAPER ATENTION TO "BLOOD" OR "CONFLICT" DIAMONDS
All eyes in the science advocacy community will be on Paris tomorrow, as the policymakers' summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is released. Though the most important scientific document on global warming, it remains unclear just how much media and public focus the report will generate.
Earlier this week, celebrities launched Global Cool, a sleek new multimedia campaign to generate attention to global warming among the sizable majority of Americans who tune out almost all coverage of public…
nisbetmc | January 30, 2007
Scientists and environmental advocates will watch with excited anticipation on Friday as the policymakers' summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is released in Paris, France. The IPCC reports are designed to be the most important events in climate science and policy, gathering world experts to craft an authoritative summary of the state of human understanding. Yet here in the United States, if past trends are predictive, the IPCC report is unlikely to make a major dent in the news or public agenda, much less shift public opinion.
As the Pew analysis (pictured above) of…
nisbetmc | January 17, 2007
The latest analysis of the week's top news agenda stories from the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that despite the Dems best efforts to draw media and public attention to their roster of House bills, most notably stem cell research, coverage of the president's Iraq policy and national address completely dominated the media agenda:
The debate over what to do next in Iraq thoroughly dominated the news landscape last week, according to the PEJ News Coverage Index. In the second week of the new year (January 7-12) Iraq policy filled 34% of the overall newshole and was the top story…
nisbetmc | October 12, 2006
You know you have reached a new ethical low in advertising when 9/11 is now fair game for selling commercial products, much less pickup trucks.
But for those who haven't caught the ad, Chevy is running a commercial throughout primetime that fronts John "Cougar" Mellencamp singing "This is Our Country," and a montage featuring flag waving, images of the heartland, first responders, and a picture of the "trade towers of light."
The full minute version of the ad starts with scenes from the civil rights era and Vietnam war (archived here at You Tube), but the 30 second version of the commercial…
nisbetmc | September 28, 2006
Email list servs and blogs aren't the only things buzzing about the new documentary 'Jesus Camp,' (trailer) which opens in major cities this weekend, including here in D.C. The news media has also discovered the film, and its impact has been to generate a string of news reports that focus on a very specific framing of the Evangelical movement. In this case, 'Jesus Camp' serves a function that I have talked about with other documentaries: It elevates attention to a specific social or political issue in the news, but at the same time, interjects a selective framing of the topic.
News media…
nisbetmc | September 26, 2006
If it isn't already obvious, the GOP game plan for the November election is to make September 11 and the war on terror the dominant consideration for voters, rather than the troubles in Iraq, and the lingering questions of GOP competency following Katrina. All the tools of strategic communication are being applied including negative advertising, bullypulpit agenda-setting, and selective frame devices such as calling Dems "defeato-crats" (See this overview of the game plan from the NY Times.) At the local level, the GOP plans to spend 90% of their advertising budget on negative ads, with…