scholarly journals The story is that there is no story: media framing of synthetic biology and its ethical implications in the New York Times (2005–2015)

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. A02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Giordano ◽  
Yi-Lin Chung

Despite low public knowledge of synthetic biology, it is the focus of prominent government and academic ethics debates. We examine the “NY Times” media coverage of synthetic biology. Our results suggest that the story about synthetic biology remains ambiguous. We found this in four areas — 1) on the question of whether the field raises ethical concerns, 2) on its relationship to genetic engineering, 3) on whether or not it threatens ‘nature’, and 4) on the temporality of these concerns. We suggest that this ambiguity creates conditions in which there becomes no reason for the public at large to become involved.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 255-275
Author(s):  
Yiqin Ruan ◽  
Jing Yang ◽  
Jianbin Jin

Biotechnology, as an emerging technology, has drawn much attention from the public and elicited hot debates in countries around the world and among various stakeholders. Due to the public's limited access to front-line scientific information and scientists, as well as the difficulty of processing complex scientific knowledge, the media have become one of the most important channels for the public to get news about scientific issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). According to framing theory, how the media portray GMO issues may influence audiences’ perceptions of those issues. Moreover, different countries and societies have various GMO regulations, policies and public opinion, which also affect the way media cover GMO issues. Thus, it is necessary to investigate how GMO issues are covered in different media outlets across different countries. We conducted a comparative content analysis of media coverage of GMO issues in China, the US and the UK. One mainstream news portal in each of the three countries was chosen ( People's Daily for China, The New York Times for the US, and The Guardian for the UK). We collected coverage over eight years, from 2008 to 2015, which yielded 749 pieces of news in total. We examined the sentiments expressed and the generic frames used in coverage of GMO issues. We found that the factual, human interest, conflict and regulation frames were the most common frames used on the three portals, while the sentiments expressed under those frames varied across the media outlets, indicating differences in the state of GMO development, promotion and regulation among the three countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 438-470
Author(s):  
Alexandra Snipes ◽  
Cas Mudde

AbstractAlthough the populist radical right is generally seen as a particularly masculine and misogynist phenomenon, several of its parties have female leaders. The most prominent is Marine Le Pen, president of the French National Rally (formerly the National Front) and unofficial leader of the European populist radical right. Using insights from intersectionality theory, we posit that Marine Le Pen, as a female populist radical right politician, faces qualitatively different media coverage than both her female and her radical right counterparts. In this study, we analyze her media framing in two French (Le Figaro and Le Monde) and two U.S. (New York Times and Wall Street Journal) newspapers, focusing on the application of gender and populist radical right frames. We find that the “harder” populist radical right frame dominates the “softer” gender frame in all four newspapers, but, paradoxically, the combination of the two frames leads to overall less biased coverage of Marine Le Pen compared with both other female and other populist radical right politicians. In the conclusion, we discuss some of the consequences of the findings for the broader study of female politicians, most notably, theories of intersectionality and the double bind for women in leadership.


Author(s):  
Marisa Abrajano ◽  
Zoltan L. Hajnal

This chapter examines the role of news media in driving white fears regarding immigration. In particular, it explores the relationship between media coverage of immigration and aggregate shifts in white party identification. It first considers how the media influences public opinion before discussing the media's profit-driven incentives to frame immigration in a negative manner. Content analysis of immigration-related articles from the New York Times from 1980 to 2011 shows that when the issue of immigration is brought to the attention of the public, it is generally with an emphasis on the negative consequences of immigration. This negative coverage leads to important effects on white macropartisanship. Across this time period, the chapter finds that the reliance on the Latino threat narrative by the media is correlated with significant defection away from the Democratic Party along with increases in the proportion of the public that identifies as Republicans and Independents.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852098744
Author(s):  
Ke Li ◽  
Qiang Zhang

Media representations have significant power to shape opinions and influence public response to communities or groups around the world. This study investigates media representations of Islam and Muslims in the American media, drawing upon an analysis of reports in the New York Times over a 17-year period (from Jan.1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2016) within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. It examines how Islam and Muslims are represented in media coverage and how discursive power is penetrated step by step through such media representations. Most important, it investigates whether Islam and Muslims have been stigmatized through stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. The findings reveal that the New York Times’ representations of Islam and Muslims are negative and stereotypical: Islam is stereotyped as the unacclimatized outsider and the turmoil maker and Muslims as the negative receiver. The stereotypes contribute to people’s prejudice, such as Islamophobia from the “us” group and fear of the “them” group but do not support a strong conclusion of discrimination.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 845-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hawdon ◽  
James Hawdon ◽  
Atte Oksanen ◽  
James Hawdon ◽  
Atte Oksanen ◽  
...  

Abstract Although considerable research analyzes the media coverage of school shootings, there is a lack of cross-national comparative studies. Yet, a cross-national comparison of the media coverage of school shootings can provide insight into how this coverage can affect communities. Our research focuses on the reporting of the school shootings at Virginia Tech in the U.S. and Jokela and Kauhajoki in Finland. Using 491 articles from the New York Times and Helsingin Sanomat published within a month of each shooting we investigate how reports vary between the nations and among the tragedies. We investigate if one style of framing a tragedy, the use of a “tragic frame,” may contribute to differences in the communities’ response to the events.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073953292110501
Author(s):  
Noam Tirosh ◽  
Steve Bien-Aime ◽  
Akshaya Sreenivasan ◽  
Dennis Lichtenstein

This comparative study examines framing of migration-related stories (focused on media coverage of World Refugee Day [WRD]) between four countries, and framing developments over 18 years, specifically if (and how) the 2015 peak “refugee crisis” altered news coverage of refugee issues. Elite newspapers, the New York Times (USA), the Times of India, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Haaretz (Israel) were content analyzed. Newspapers gave only sparse attention to WRD itself, but WRD was a “temporal opportunity” to discuss migration that increased coverage. But the 2015 peak refugee crisis had little effect on coverage over the long run.


1998 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 560-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Flamiano

This article analyzes the emergence of media discourses on contraception from 1915 to 1917, focusing on coverage in the New York Times, The New Republic, and Harper's Weekly. Considered legally obscene and unfit for public discussion, contraception first made headlines as a result of Margaret Sanger's birth control activism and ensuing legal troubles. After the New York Times covered Sanger's activities, several magazines began to publish articles on the contraception debate. This early coverage of birth control emphasized its scientific and social utility, virtually ignoring controversial issues of gender, sexuality, and power.


PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 1010-1015
Author(s):  
Celeste Langan

When my berkeley colleague the poet robert hass wrote for the new york times an account of the occupy cal event of 9 november 2011, he described the “strange contingencies” that struck his mind (even as the police baton struck his body). Since that day, when I was arrested (the police used a technique they call a hair-pull takedown) for linking arms with students to protect tents erected in solidarity with Occupy and in defiance of the campus's no-tents policy, I too have felt those contingencies. My decision to participate was no accident; I wanted to resist the conceptual and practical attenuation of the ideal of education as a res publica. But at the time of my arrest I had not yet recognized how much Occupy resonates with issues I have made the center of my scholarly life: vagrancy, mobility, freedom. This brief essay considers the new inflection Occupy has given to my understanding of the work of education. To exercise freedom of thought is not merely to engage heterodox ideas; it is to make thinking take place and take its time. It is to refuse attempts to constrain, by regulations concerning time, place, and manner, the public exercise of thinking.


Novum Jus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Julián Rodríguez ◽  
Andrew M. Clark

This research uses in-depth interviews with three data journalists from the Houston Chronicle and the New York Times in the United States to describe the role of data journalists, and to illustrate how and why they use big data in their stories. Data journalists possess a unique set of skills including being able to find data, gather data, and use that data to tell a compelling story in a written and visually coherent way. Results show that as newspapers move to a digital format the role of a data journalist is becoming more essential as is the importance of laws such as the Freedom of Information Act to enable journalists to request and use data to continue to inform the public and hold those in power accountable. 


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Massarani ◽  
Luiz Felipe Fernandes Neves

The search for an effective solution to control the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized an unprecedented effort by science to develop a vaccine against the disease, in which pharmaceutical companies and scientific institutions from several countries participate. The world closely monitors research in this area, especially through media coverage, which plays a key role in the dissemination of trustful information and in the public’s understanding of science and health. On the other hand, anti-vaccine movements dispute space in this communication environment, which raises concerns of the authorities regarding the willingness of the population to get vaccinated. In this exploratory study, we used computer-assisted content analysis techniques, with WordStat software, to identify the most addressed terms, semantic clusters, actors, institutions, and countries in the texts and titles of 716 articles on the COVID-19 vaccine, published by The New York Times (US), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), from January to October 2020. We sought to analyze similarities and differences of countries that stood out by the science denialism stance of their government leaders, reflecting on the severity of the pandemic in these places. Our results indicate that each newspaper emphasized the potential vaccines developed by laboratories in their countries or that have established partnerships with national institutions, but with a more politicized approach in Brazil and a little more technical-scientific approach in the United States and the United Kingdom. In external issues, the newspapers characterized the search for the discovery of a vaccine as a race in which nations and blocs historically marked by economic, political, and ideological disputes are competing, such as the United States, Europe, China, and Russia. The results lead us to reflect on the responsibility of the media to not only inform correctly but also not to create stigmas related to the origin of the vaccine and combat misinformation.


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