Matthew Nisbet and Mike Huge use Downs’s attention cycle model as a starting point for their attempt to construct a generalisable theory of “mediated issue development” (Nisbet and Huge, 2006). Taking the issue of plant biotechnology, the authors sketch the rise and fall of media coverage using the Downsian approach, before combining other approaches from the sociology of social problems to come up with their own model which conceptualises “several important underlying social mechanisms that drive cycles of media attention and definition to policy issues” (Ibid 2006, p. 7). Downs’s model, as we have seen above, has been criticised for being descriptive, anecdotal and for failing to examine the underlying factors that drive his attention cycle; here, the authors attempt to address some of these criticisms by paying attention to these underlying factors. In particular, they identify and investigate four factors which, they argue, influence the progress of an issue through the attention cycle:
(i) the type of policy venue where the debate takes place or is centred.;
(ii) the media lobbying activities of competing strategic actors as they attempt to interpret or “frame” the issue advantageously;
(iii) the tendency for different types of journalists to depend heavily on shared news values and norms to narrate the policy world, and
(iv) the context relative to other competing issues. (Nisbet and Huge, 2006, p. 7)
The first factor in whether an issue achieves “celebrity status” is policy venue. The authors argue that, when issues are confined to technical and scientific policy venues from which the public is excluded, media coverage is low, change occurs incrementally and discourse is characterised by consensus. In these venues, the “scope of participation” (Schnattschneider, 1960) is also low. However, when an issue moves into administrative and more overtly political arenas, consensus is replaced by conflict, change can be non- incremental and media coverage is increased. In regulatory policy venues, science and industry may be granted a “political monopoly” and the authority of science is defended through the use of impersonal language and technical discourse. Secondly, the authors consider the framing strategies of those actors trying to broaden the scope of participation of an issue, and to move it from technical venues to more political ones. This approach acknowledges the importance of the power to define an issue and therefore to frame it in advantageous ways. As other researchers have noted, “framing an issue is therefore a strategic means to attract more supporters, to mobilise collective actions, to expand actors’ realm of influences, and to increase their chances of winning” (Pan and Kosicki, 2001, p. 40). Schnattschneider goes even further, calling the ability to define a given issue “the supreme instrument of power” (Schnattschneider, 1960).
Nisbet and Huge also give weight to the work practices and routines of journalists in their model of mediated issue development. Just as moving from technical to political policy venues can help promote an issue, so too can changes in the kind of journalist covering it. The authors argue that, when a scientific or technical issue is covered solely by science correspondents, it tends to be framed in scientific or technical terms. However, once it begins to be covered by political correspondents, it is more likely to be presented in the strategy frame and media coverage increases (Nisbet and Huge, 2006, p. 13). The authors do not elaborate on the fourth factor in their model, “context relative to other issues”, perhaps because it is self-evident that more urgent and dramatic news usually rises to the top of the news agenda. Indeed, in the opening to their paper, the authors outline a controversy over the contamination of food products with genetically modified corn. Just when public concern was at its height, the recount in Florida at the conclusion of the 2000 US presidential election came to dominate the news agenda.
The model of mediated issue development is attractive because it examines the underlying factors which produce Anthony Downs’s issue attention cycle. It draws together concepts from Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory (specifically, the analysis of sub-governments, their inherent biases and relative imperviousness to outside influence) and from earlier social theorists such as Schnattschneider and Cobb and Elder (1972) on the changes in power structures that come about when new participants join the debate relating to an issue. The proposed mediated issue development theory is also attractive because it gives due acknowledgment to the role of the media in issue dynamics and because it is attuned to the norms and practices of journalists. The authors give regard to the influence of the
media in general in providing the forum in which various claims-makers may be heard, but also to the individual journalist and the influence of the framing choices he or she may make as a correspondent or editor.
3.14 Conclusion
This thesis is aimed at discovering and examining how climate change was framed by various actors engaged in communicating about this issue during a key period in the history of Irish environmental politics. To understand the framing strategies of environmental journalists, government ministers and media advisors, it is necessary to place them in the context of what is known about frames and framing, and in the context of our understanding of the interaction of the media, policy and political arenas in relation to complex social problems. In this chapter, theories of media effects and theories of agenda systems were discussed with a view to exploring how these perspectives can promote understandings of issue dynamics.
In the case of each of these theories, the imprint of its academic origins is evident. Theories of media effects are often proposed by journalism scholars and emphasise the social power of the media or the individual agency of the journalist. Theories of agenda systems often originate in sociology or political science, and place the media in wider social and political processes in which the agency of the media (and of individual journalists) is neglected.
For instance, agenda-setting theory, proposed by two journalism professors (McCombs and Shaw, 1972), sought to re-establish the notion of powerful media influences on audiences after a period in which the academy had favoured communications models
which suggested the influence of mass media on individuals was minimal (Katz, 1987; McCombs, 2004). Agenda-setting also enabled other theories of media effects to be proposed, such as second-level agenda-setting (Hester and Gibson, 2003) and priming (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987b). Taken together, these three related approaches suggest the media has the power to tell people what to think about, how to think about it and by what standards they should judge politicians. Thus, they assign almost complete power to set the public and political agenda to the media and, it can be argued, fail to acknowledge the agency of other actors and the possibility that other forces can control or influence the media themselves.
The media effect of framing is, I would argue, of a different order to the three agenda- related theories mentioned above. It must first be acknowledged that framing is similar to second-level agenda-setting in that frames foreground certain aspects of a topic or issue. However, a key difference is that frames also contain elements of issue definition, attribution of responsibility and problem solution. Frames place issues in context, interpret and organise information for their intended audience. For instance, presenting the issue of climate change in an economic frame suggests that the origins of, responsibility for, and solutions to the problem lie in the economic arena.
It is important to emphasise that both agenda-setting and framing theorists foreground the idea of competition. Agenda-setting promotes the idea of competition between issues (Dearing and Rogers, 1996; McCombs, 2004) for media attention, while framing theorists focus on the competition over how such coverage is framed, and on who prevails in the competition to establish the dominant frame (Borah, 2011; Nisbet et al, 2013).
Another conceptual approach which takes account of a general media effect is that of issue cultures and social scares (Ungar, 1992, 2000b). This approach suggests that the media create cultures around certain long-standing problems, and therefore the public is more receptive to news from this issue culture and may more readily place new information in the context of the existing culture. Examples of topics with issue cultures are nuclear power, infectious diseases, the atmosphere, and national security. Thus, when news relating to any of these topics is forthcoming, the public is already in possession of certain baseline information and a “latent fear” may be activated to produce a “social scare” and lead to demands for political action. The concept is attractive, as it may help explain why some issues come to dominate the policy, media and political discourse, but it has not been developed past its initial outlines, and remains a fringe sociological concept.
The influence of media coverage is placed in a wider perspective by theories of agenda systems. These theories seek to understand how policy, political, media and other arenas interact to promote certain issues to the top of the policy agenda, while other issues remain undiscovered or at a low priority level. There is a common process to these agenda models, even though the terminology, imagery and precise operational details differ. The models discussed – the punctuated equilibrium (Jones and Baumgartner, 2012), multiple streams (Kingdon, 1995) and public arenas (Hilgartner and Bosk, 1988) models – all provide situations in which a problem exists in the background, a sudden event brings it to public attention, various interested parties provide feedback which serve to increase attention.
Some of these models propose concepts which correspond to existing ideas in media theory. For instance, the public arenas model suggests that each arena (the media is one such) has its own cultural, political and institutional factors which affect an issue’s ability to survive. This concept is related to the professional norms and news values described by journalism scholarship. Furthermore, all of the models allow for a media role (if not influence) in providing or amplifying the feedback offers by claims makers.
The mediated issue development model (Nisbet & Huge, 2006), however, allows for a more developed role for the media as a whole and for individual journalists. This approach is attractive because it attempts to synthesise some of the elements and processes involved in agenda systems (such as policy venue) with the scholarship of news values and the sociology of the newsroom. It also privileges the frame competition between various sectors and actors and provides a more plausible account of how issues develop in the media and policy realms.
Chapter 4 Methodology
4.1 Introduction
The study of media coverage of climate change has proliferated over the past decade (Olausson and Berglez, 2014) and a wide variety of methodologies have been employed to interrogate the extent and nature of such coverage (Metag, 2016). Many scholars set out from a starting position that the media’s coverage of the issue is important because, quite apart from the agenda-setting influence of the media, which was discussed in the previous chapter, “Most people do not experience climate change first-hand but have to rely on communicative content to develop an understanding of climate change” (Metag, 2016, p. 2). Because climate change involves complex processes which take place over long periods of time and affect large spatial entities such as continents, hemispheres or even the entire planet, and because it is measured and described by scientists from an increasing number of different disciplines using complex models and measurements, “the scientific community has long acknowledged the importance of media communication on climate change” (Schäfer and Schlichting, 2014, p. 143). Media coverage of climate change is important not only for the general public, but also for stakeholders and decision- makers (Arlt, Hoppe and Wolling, 2011). In their meta-analysis of the research field, Schäfer and Schlichting (2014, pp. 148–152) found that print was the most analysed medium (67% of 199 studies from 1960 to 2012), European countries were studied most (39.4%), although studies of Asian countries (14%) were becoming more common. They also found that qualitative (44.8%) and quantitative (47.8%) methods were almost equally represented, while single-country case studies (39.6%) were the most common focus of research. The research presented here sits squarely in this research tradition,
being a single-country case study in which print media coverage of climate change is analysed. However, there are elements of the research design of this thesis which differ from the majority of similar studies. Schäfer and Schlichting note that case studies “typically focus on coverage in one national context and within a given, mostly short period of time” (Ibid 2014, p. 152); this research covers a longer period of time (a decade, from 2007 to 2016). This study is also relatively unusual in combining both qualitative and quantitative methods, an approach adopted by only 7.5% of other studies. In the following sections, each aspect of the methodology is considered, beginning with a description of the research question and the general design of the research.