Media and scientific communication: a case of climate change

This paper explores how media representational practices shape and affect current international science and policy or practice communications, through a focus on climate change. Many complex factors contribute to these interactions. The norms and pressures that guide journalistic decision-making and shape mass-media coverage of anthropogenic climate science critically shape current discourses at the highly politicized climate science–policy interface. This paper investigates the multifarious journalistic, political, cultural and economic norms that dynamically influence media coverage of climate science. It explores the case-study of climate change to also work through factors shaping the translation of uncertainty in climate science. This project demonstrates that mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of articles and segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages. Moreover, this research shows how mass media play a significant role in shaping the construction and maintenance of discourse on climate change at the interface of science and policy. It can often feel like an insurmountable challenge to effectively communicate environmental geoscience via mass media. To do so, one must compress the complexities of time and spatial scales into succinct yet accurate ‘sound bites’ as well as crisply worded commentary. These portrayals are what are typically valued by policy actors, mass media and public citizens. Although this process can seem akin to trying to adequately summarize the contours of biogeochemistry in the space of a picture postcard, this is the challenge at hand. In the spirit of writer John McPhee, science communication can be situated within the larger landscape of this geological time and space that is represented and described. In Annals of the Former World, McPhee provides the well-known analogy that the 4.6 billion year history of time on Earth can be considered like distance from fingertip to fingertip with one’s arms spread wide. He writes that, ‘the Cambrian begins at the wrist . . . all of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history’ (McPhee 1998). Thus, perhaps it would merely take a finegrained nail file to remove the history of science communications and mass media. Organized studies of the art of communications, called Rhetoric, began in ancient Greek and Roman times. However, it was not until the 1920s that scholars actually began to speak of such activities as ‘media’, as they are now widely dubbed in contemporary society (Briggs & Burke 2005). Since these early roots and through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, media representations have encompassed a wide range of activities and modes of communication. From performance art, plays and poetry to news and debate, media portrayals have drawn on narratives, arguments, allusions and reports to communicate various themes, information, issues and events. The increasing reach of modern media communications has led to the term ‘mass media’. Mass media have played an important role in translation (of information, concepts, developments, debates) between communities, such as science and the public. ‘Mass media’ are now commonly referred to as the publishers, editors, journalists and others who constitute this communications industry, and who translate information, through production, interpretation and dissemination, through outlets such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio and the Internet. Through human time scales, mass-media coverage has proven to be a key contributor, among a number of factors, that has shaped and affected continuing interactions between science, politics and the public. These media communications unfold within larger contexts that include elements such as regulatory frameworks, technical capacity challenges, cultural and institutional pressures, as well as journalistic norms. This paper surveys some of these interacting factors in the production of mass-media representations, through this focus on communicating science via mass media. It explores the case-study of climate change to work through political, economic, social, cultural and journalistic pressures, From: LIVERMAN, D. G. E., PEREIRA, C. P. G. & MARKER, B. (eds). Communicating Environmental Geoscience. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 305, 11–18. DOI: 10.1144/SP305.3 0305-8719/08/$15.00 # The Geological Society of London 2008. and how these influence media ‘framings’. The paper then illustrates salient features of these communications through a discussion of factors shaping the translation of uncertainty in climate science. The focus here is on the production of media portrayals and associated factors, and thus does not centrally take up the complex and non-linear connections to public uptake and/or resistance as well as issues of individual (dis)engagement. However, these framing processes provide explicit links to these other arenas. Once news texts, segments and messages (from television or radio broadcasts, to printed newspapers or magazines, and Internet communications) are assembled, they compete in public spaces for attention. Moreover, these public discourses permeate and integrate to varying degrees into personal understanding and behaviour. Precisely how this information is interpreted and translated into decisions and potential behavioural change is complex, dynamic and contested, and feeds back into continuing production processes. Discussing these connected issues in detail is beyond the scope of this contribution. Communicating (climate) science