Contested Science in the Media

Abstract

Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, e.g., biotechnology, climate change, and more recently, geoengineering. The reporter's framing of the issue is likely to influence readers' perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, focusing primarily on the 'stories' told about the issue. The current paper, on the other hand, springs from an interest in writer behavior. I wish to investigate how news writers strategically exploit their rhetorical competence when reporting on contested issues, and I argue that text linguistics represents a fruitful approach to studying this process. It is suggested that genre features may serve as a basis for identifying key framing locations in the text, and that the notion of evaluation plays an important part in writers' framing activity. I discuss these aspects through a case study involving six news reports on a geoengineering experiment. KeywordsScience communication, news discourse, framing theory, text linguistics, genre, evaluation For most people, the reality of science is what they read in the press. They understand science less through direct experience or past education than through the filter of journalistic language and imagery. The media are their only contact with what is going on in rapidly changing scientific and technological fields, as well as a major source of information about the implications of these changes for their lives. (Nelkin, 1995, p. 2)The two decades that have passed since this observation was made have seen the rapid development of new information and communication channels for mediating science issues to non-expert audiences, such as the blog network ScienceBlogs (scienceblog.com; see also Colson, 2011;Luzón, 2013) and initiatives like the university-based scientific news portal Futurity (futurity.org). However, traditional media sources such as newspapers still seem to represent important providers of news to the general public (e.g., Pew Research Center, 2013), and the To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and /or treatment recommendation for the item described. (Entman 1993, p. 52, italics in original) From a writing perspective, framing may thus be considered as a process that implies a strategic (conscious or subconscious) choice of angle (frame) by the text producer. The chosen framing implies selecting specific aspects of the issue/event at hand, making these particular aspects salient to readers. Considered in this perspective, framing clearly relates to persuasion. It thereby shares concerns with classical rhetoric, e.g., the notion of special topic, which deals with the specific content of an argument through deliberative, forensic, or epideictic oratory. Fahnestock (1986) shows how scientif...

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