Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D, is a professor in the School of Communication at American University where his research focuses on the intersections between science, media, and politics. E-MAIL: nisbetmc@gmail.com
In a new campaign advertisement (above), Senator John McCain focuses on global warming, framing his position as a pragmatic "middle way" approach between the two extremes of denying there is a problem and resorting to heavy taxation and regulation. The ad even ends by offering up the complementary frame that global warming is in fact a national security problem. (Also notably, the ad refers to and uses imagery of more intense hurricanes, a "pandora's box" framing that has led to claims of alarmism directed at advocates such as Al Gore.)
While McCain's commitment to climate change policy is welcome, the advertisement's false balancing of climate change denial against the type of tough measures we need to solve the problem is deceptive and self-serving. That's also the lesson from a front page lead story today at the Washington Post by Juliet Eilperin.
As she writes:
An examination of McCain's voting record shows an inconsistent approach to the environment: He champions some "green" causes while casting sometimes contradictory votes on others. The senator from Arizona has been resolute in his quest to impose a federal limit on greenhouse gas emissions, even when it means challenging his own party. But he has also cast votes against tightening fuel-efficiency standards and resisted requiring public utilities to offer a specific amount of electricity from renewable sources. He has worked to protect public lands in his home state, winning a 2001 award from the National Parks Conservation Association for helping give the National Park Service some say over air tours around the Grand Canyon, work that prompts former interior secretary and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt to call him "a great friend of the canyon." But he has also pushed to set aside Endangered Species Act protections when they conflict with other priorities, such as the construction of a University of Arizona observatory on Mount Graham.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser, said the senator does not always please "environmental groups who are single-issue, litmus test" organizations. Instead, he said, McCain seeks to weigh the costs and benefits of each environmental issue.
"Look, he always balances what are the environmental implications of these enterprises and what are the economic benefits that could come from them," Holtz-Eakin said. "That is, in general, an approach which may be harder to read than a flat ideological X or Y, but it's how he reads these things, it's how he evaluates these kinds of decisions."
As a result, McCain scores significantly lower than his Democratic rivals for the presidency, Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), in interest groups' studies of his environmental voting record. McCain's lifetime League of Conservation Voters score is 24 percent, compared with 86 for Obama and 86 for Clinton; Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund's conservation report card gave him 38 percent in the 108th Congress and 40 in the 109th. (McCain has missed every major environmental vote this Congress, giving him a zero rating.)
When Karpinski [head of the League of Conservation Voters] tells audiences about McCain's environmental scorecard rating, he said, "jaws drop. . . . I tell them, 'He's not as green as you think he is.' "
Gallup has released a survey showing that at this point in the race, Obama's association with Wright may be potentially more damaging to his candidacy than McCain's continued embrace of Bush. The reason, as the survey details (below), is that the association with Wright actually hurts McCain among some Democrat leaners (19% say less likely to vote for Obama), whereas McCain's strong alliance with Bush has less of an impact among Republican leaners (10% less likely to vote for McCain).
In political advertising and messaging, you can expect both campaigns along with independent expenditure groups to play on these associations, making for powerful emotional imagery.
Since Earth Day, a number of pollshave been released confirming that public opinion on climate change has changed very little over the past two years or since the premiere of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's mind, but unfortunately this interpretation doesn't hold up to the data. Americans already concerned about the issue have grown more intense in their feelings, while many others continue to disregard the problem.
The latest evidence is this Pew survey, that details the lingering divide in public perceptions among partisans on the topic, with this divide greatest among the college educated. For more background, see this column I wrote on "Going beyond Gore's message," a study I recently published reviewing two decades of public opinion data on global warming, this recent news analysis of polling trends, and this earlier discussion of what exactly accounts for the major gulf in perceptions among college educated partisans.
Obama as young Luke Skywalker, Hillary as Darth Vader, Bill as the Emperor, Bill Richardson as Han Solo. This new viral video promoting Obama's candidacy is brilliant and effective humor. Just more evidence as to why Obama is engaging young voters like no other presidential candidate in recent memory.
Pew has released an in depth analysis of news coverage of the Pope's U.S. visit. As I have posted previously, some media critics have claimed that the press gave the Pontiff a pass on hard-hitting questions while polls show that the Pope's visit was a major public relations success.
As the Pew news analysis finds, the Pope's visit dominated headlines, accounting for 16% of the total news hole for the week, eclipsing for example the 5% of coverage devoted to the war in Iraq and second in attention only to the 31% of coverage devoted to the election. According to Pew, the saturation coverage of the Pope's visit makes it one of the top four news stories of 2008.
Also of interest was the strategic framing by the Vatican of the sexual abuse scandals, a framing controlled by way of careful news management including the stipulation that journalists had to submit their questions in advance. Here's what Pew finds about how the Pope's preferred "shame" framing was echoed in the press:
Pope Benedict said he felt "deeply ashamed" of the scandal, offering a description of his personal emotion, which the media emphasized. ABC's Chris Cuomo, reporting the next day on "Good Morning America," described the scene this way: "Even before his plane ... touched down, the pope addressed one of the most troubling issues in the American Catholic Church, the priest abuse scandal, telling reporters on his flight that the shame of the church is deeply felt."
The New York Times' April 16 headline said, "Pope, in U.S., Is 'Ashamed' of Pedophile Priests." On CNN's "AndersonCooper360," the network's veteran Vatican analyst, John Allen, said he was the reporter who submitted the question on the scandal several days before the trip began. Allen was told the pope would answer the question in Italian. "I stressed to the pope," said Allen, "that, because this was such an important topic, it would be valuable to have it from him in English. And he was quite ready to do that. So, I think what that reflects is an understanding on the part of this pope that he cannot come into the United States and not engage what has been the deepest wound in the life of the Catholic Church in this country for more than its 200-year history, which, of course, is the sex abuse crisis."
Here are the key findings of the Pew analysis:
1. The media devoted significant amounts of time and space to the story. All told, the pope's visit accounted for 16% of the overall "newshole," the time or space available in an outlet for news content, during the week of April 14-20. In the first four months of 2008, the only stories that received more coverage during a single week were the presidential campaign, the troubled U.S. economy and the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal.
2. Two story lines dominated the coverage. Out of all the newshole dedicated to the pope's visit, more than half (54%) was comprised of stories that focused on the impact of the clergy sex abuse scandal (37%) or on the relationship between Pope Benedict and American Catholics (17%).
3. Coverage, for the most part, ignored the pope's relationships with external constituencies. Just 1% focused on the pope's relationships with other religious leaders or other faiths, and only 3% focused on the pope and the Bush administration or the pope and American politics. Only 2% of the coverage made any reference to the U.S. presidential campaign.
What the media did not cover during the pope's U.S. visit may be as noteworthy as what it did cover:
* A controversial 2006 portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad by Pope Benedict prompted a global uproar among Muslims, and the pope's March 2008 baptism of a Muslim convert to Catholicism raised more than a few eyebrows, yet the pope's April 17 meeting in Washington, D.C., with Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Jews received little media attention. Overall, only 1% of the newshole dedicated to the pope's visit focused on his relations with other religious leaders or faiths.
* On April 16, Pope Benedict became only the second pontiff ever to visit the White House. He met privately with President Bush to discuss, among other things, the plight of Christians in Iraq. He also gave an address on the South Lawn in which he said, "a democracy without values can lose its very soul." The more political aspects of the pope's visit were not a major factor in the coverage. Only 3% focused on the pope and the Bush administration or on Pope Benedict and American politics.
* In a presidential election year, the pope touched on a few policy issues that went beyond the church's well-known opposition to abortion. For example, the pope addressed environmentalism, saying that "the earth itself groans under the weight of consumerist greed and irresponsible exploitation." He also commented on immigration in a joint statement with Bush that pointed to "the need for a coordinated policy" that ensures "humane treatment and the well being" of immigrant families. But with a few notable exceptions, such as an April 20 New York Times article on the pope and his immigration stance, such issues were not a major focus of coverage. Less than 2% of the coverage made any reference to the U.S. presidential campaign.
Can a radio talk show host motivate Republicans to turn out in a Democratic primary and vote strategically for a candidate? Past research suggests that political talk radio can have an independent influence on political participation, but in the primaries last week, how much specific impact did Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos have on the primary results?
Limbaugh urged his mostly Republican listeners to turn out and vote for Clinton. I am sure we will see analysis and papers from political scientists on this topic, but for now, here's the best summary of the exit poll data that I have seen, from a report in yesterday's Washington Post:
Those looking for evidence of Limbaugh's influence pointed to Clinton's edge among Republicans in Indiana and North Carolina. In Indiana, 10 percent of Democratic primary voters described themselves as Republicans, a higher rate than in any state but Mississippi, and they went for Clinton by eight percentage points, according to exit polls. In North Carolina, they were 5 percent of the electorate, and went for her by 29 points.
By contrast, Obama won Republican voters, often by very large margins, in seven of the eight states where exit polls were able to report the group before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, when Limbaugh first coaxed listeners to vote for Clinton.
Also notable was that in Indiana, six in 10 Republicans who supported Clinton on Tuesday said they would vote for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain over Clinton in the fall, if that were the matchup. By contrast, most Republicans who voted for Obama said they would back him against McCain. And a slight majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton in Indiana told pollsters that she does not share their values, raising further questions about why they supported her.
But at least as much data suggested that many Republicans voted for Clinton because the Democratic primary was the more meaningful one and because they simply preferred her to Obama. In Indiana, about nine in 10 GOP Clinton voters said she would make a better commander in chief, and more than six in 10 said she would have a better shot at beating McCain.
And Clinton's edge among Indiana Republicans was relatively small, if set against the broader racial divisions in the contest. Her eight-point advantage among Republicans, nearly all of whom are white in the state, was much narrower than it was among white Democrats, whom she won by nearly 2 to 1 over Obama.
Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, said that he concluded from the data that while Operation Chaos "existed to some extent, I don't think it was a major factor."
Bill McKibben's latest grassroots project is the launch of www.350.org, a Web portal and blog designed to focus world attention on cutting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.
From the Web site:
Dear friends,
350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.
We're planning an international campaign to unite the world around the number 350, and we need your help. We need to make sure that the solutions the world proposes to climate change are to scale with the level of crisis that this number represents. Everyone on earth, from the smallest village to the cushiest corner office, needs to know what 350 means. The movement to spread that number needs to be beautiful, creative, and unstoppable.
What we need most right now are on-the-ground examples for how to take the number 350 and drive it home: in art, in music, in political demonstrations, in any other way you can imagine. We hope this project will grow tremendously in the months to come, and it helps all the more if people can see the great things others are doing already. We will connect actions all around the world and make them add up to more than the sum of their parts-but we don't have all the ideas and all the inspiration. We need you to act on yours.
McKibben the author has turned his focus to becoming a global climate change movement builder. In an interview with Environment & Energy Daily, here's what he says about his strategy (transcript):
Monica Trauzzi: In a recent article you wrote, "We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement, as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we're not going to best the fossil fuels companies and the auto makers and the rest of the vested of interests that are keeping us from change." Are all the elements coming into place now? Is that happening?
Bill McKibben: Let's hope so. I mean I'm doing what little I can. We launched last year this movement called Step It Up '07 and working with a few college students I organized about 1400 demonstrations around the country on global warming last year. And in this country we managed to get our message across. Our demand for 80 percent carbon cuts by 2050 became the centerpiece of both Obama and Clinton's energy and environmental platform and it's reflected in the Lieberman-Warner legislation making its way through Congress. Now, we're taking on the next most difficult question, which is how we're going to get the whole world behind this kind of climate stuff. We've just formed, the same crew of mine, has just formed a new group called 350.org, three, five, zero dot org, to launch a global grassroots campaign. The number refers to what the scientist Jim Hansen in particular is now telling us is the safe uppermost limit of carbon in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. A tough number, because we're already at 385 and, you know, we've got to cut back now if we're going to have some hope of getting there. So that's what I work on a lot of the time and I turn to writers like this for kind of inspiration and guidance about what worked in the past and what didn't work in the past. We've got one more bite at this apple, so we better get it right.
Following his first visit to the United States as spiritual leader of the world's Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI is viewed more favorably than he was a few weeks before his trip. Currently, 61% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of the pope, up from 52% in late March. Views of Pope Benedict's outreach to other faiths have shown substantial improvement. Roughly half (51%) of those who have heard at least a little about the pope say he has done an excellent or good job with respect to his interfaith efforts while just 29% rate his efforts in this area as only fair or poor. In late March, the public was evenly split in assessments of the pope's promotion of relations with other religions in March (39% excellent or good vs. 40% only fair or poor).
Opinions of Pope Benedict's handling of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal, an issue raised by the pontiff several times during his visit, are more mixed. About half (48%) who have heard something about the pope rate his efforts in addressing the scandal as only fair or poor, while 39% say he has done a good or excellent job in this regard.
This week's On the MediaspotlightsRushmore Drive, the new search engine marketed to African Americans (audio above). As the program describes, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to find those sites that are most heavily trafficked by blacks and to return them at the top of the search results. From host Bob Garfield's interview with CEO Johnny Taylor:
JOHNNY TAYLOR: The algorithm, it's one of the few places where the black community becomes the majority for purposes of producing results. In all of the mainstream search engines, the majority's behavior is what detects how the results are ultimately delivered.
BOB GARFIELD: So you actually kind of rig the game by giving more prominence, based on ratings or whatever, to certain websites because they are identifiably black?
JOHNNY TAYLOR: There's no rigging of the game. We have created the new game. We have finally found a way to deliver something more relevant to a targeted group of people. What the algorithm attempts to do, based upon behavior of this community, is to elevate those results that mean something specifically to the audience. So, for example, typing in the word "Whitney" at a search engine may yield Whitney Houston and Whitney M. Young, two prominent African-American individuals, and in a mainstream search engine it may only yield results for Whitney College or Whitney Museum. What we do is deliver all four. So it's not a rigging of anything. It's a new way to crawl the Web and deliver a more relevant search experience.
Besides marketing and online advertising, BlackPlanet.org co-founder Omar Wasow notes the possible benefits for news consumers:
OMAR WASOW: It may not be that when people are going to do searches for, you know, sort of headline news that Rushmore Drive is going to give a better perspective than Google. But, you know, when you're looking for - you know, take the stories that are dominating the headlines now - Obama and Jeremiah Wright - there's a black perspective on that that's not going to be reflected in the mainstream media.
Yet greater choice and selectivity online are not always good things, as I have noted in many posts here at Framing Science and as my undergraduate classes have debated at this blog. In a second segment (audio above), On the Media focuses on the problem of homophily or the tendency for "birds of a feather to flock together."
BOB GARFIELD: Rushmore Drive and BlackPlanet hope to capitalize on the collective interests of a particular group on the principle of "birds of a feature flock together," what social scientists call homophily.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Behaviorists say it's human nature, but Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, observes that homophily is amplified on the Net, and that ought to be cause for concern.
In an age where TV news offers more and more opinion and less and less international coverage, the Internet would seem to be the logical place to find diverse views, surprising voices and news we need. But, he says, we don't find that because we don't know where to look, and mostly because we prefer to flock.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: I'm a little worried about homophily because I think homophily has the danger of making us stupid. And I mean that quite literally. I think that in a digital media world where we have the ability to pick and choose whatever it is that we want to look at, we've gone from a supply problem to a demand problem.
In the age of broadcast media, where we had four television networks and, you know, most cities had one or two major newspapers, you were trusting that media outlet to give you a wide view of the world, to let you know about stories you might not otherwise find, and there was a really big, strong editorial function there.
And one of my questions is how do we build an Internet that doesn't just show us what we want to see but also does a pretty good job of showing us what we need to see?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: I think we're at a break point. A lot of people realize that there's something broken in the media environment. The problem is we're not yet in a position to pass the baton onto participatory media on the Internet because we haven't really thought through these issues yet.
Could we build a news portal where 80 percent of the stuff is pointed to by people like you and 20 percent pointed to by people very much unlike you? It would be interesting if we could get sort of our different echo chambers to agree to have sort of an exchange program.
