Blog Discussions about the Framing of Science

Cardiff.
The final session at Future of Journalism 2009 starts with Stuart Allan, whose focus is on science journalism. One important question here is one of framing - a discursive strategy used to define the nature of a public event; a contested process between journalists and their sources and within news organisations. Frames determine how claims made by sources are selected (or not) as newsworthy, and influence public perception - sources are very aware of this and will try ensure that their comments are seen in the appropriate light.

There have been recent calls for scientists to actively ensure that their contributions to public debate are framed in the appropriate light, and this call has created a substantial amount of criticism, too - there is a sense that large numbers of the audience are 'scientifically illiterate', and the PUS (public understanding of science) model suggests that this need to be improved; however, many journalists are also doing a poor job at promoting an understanding of scientific news. There's a long way still to go.

Stuart also points to the political-economic underpinnings of science journalism - who is entitled to call themselves a science journalist, for example? The average science journalist in the UK may have trained as a journalist, but rarely has a specific scientific background; this has real implications for the treatment of science as a specialist area of reporting, of course, as does the wider background of increasing threats of churnalism - the rewriting of press releases as journalistic copy.

In this context, the blogosphere also plays an important role; there is interesting material here, but needs to be uncovered first. For science bloggres, we might ask what counts as science in the first place, and how it is reported, whether scientific uncertainty is an acceptable price for progress, and who may criticise science in a blog context.

Nisbet and Mooney's call for a better framing of science (in Science in April 2007) has galvanised some of this debate, and points to the impact of journalistic framing of scientific ideas, controversies and core values that highlights some aspects of scientifiic news stories over others. They suggest that scientists must actively frame stories themselves (without misrepresenting the facts, of course), to make news stories relevant to different audiences. One example used to explore this is reporting on the use of embryonic stem cells, which could have been framed differently to speak to proponents and opponents in this debate. Sticking to the facts here is not enough - 'as unnatural as it may feel', Nisbet and Mooney suggest, it is important to background some of the technological details at various points.

Stuart now moves to discuss various bloggers' response to this article - some of these bloggers enthusiastically embraced the ideas expressed by Nisbet and Mooney, supporting the view of the audience as largely scientifically illiterate and highlighting the questions of how far to simplify scientific ideas to reach such audiences; others were more critical and compared the framing advocated here as mere spin, as language games, which cheapen the status of science itself; yet others questioned how well equipped scientists actually are to play this game in the first place.

There is also an idea of 'citizen science' which is voiced in this context, perhaps exploring the potential for citizens to become involved in promoting science against those opposing it. Some scientists clearly point to perceptions of specific pro- or counter-science points of view being normalised in public discourse, and question of whether the debate is one over the correct portrayal of facts, or the establishment of specific values.

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