Hannah Schmid-Petri

A changing climate of skepticism: The factors shaping climate change coverage in the US press.

Skepticism toward climate change has a long tradition in the United States. We focus on mass media as the conveyors of the image of climate change and ask: Is climate change skepticism still a characteristic of US print media coverage? If so, to what degree and in what form? And which factors might pave the way for skeptics entering mass media debates? We conducted a quantitative content analysis of US print media during one year (1 June 2012 to 31 May 2013). Our results show that the debate has changed: fundamental forms of climate change skepticism (such as denial of anthropogenic causes) have been abandoned in the coverage, being replaced by more subtle forms (such as the goal to avoid binding regulations). We find no evidence for the norm of journalistic balance, nor do our data support the idea that it is the conservative press that boosts skepticism.

Applying LDA Topic Modeling in Communication Research: Toward a Valid and Reliable Methodology

ABSTRACT Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models are increasingly being used in communication research. Yet, questions regarding reliability and validity of the approach have received little attention thus far. In applying LDA to textual data, researchers need to tackle at least four major challenges that affect these criteria: (a) appropriate pre-processing of the text collection; (b) adequate selection of model parameters, including the number of topics to be generated; (c) evaluation of the model’s reliability; and (d) the process of validly interpreting the resulting topics. We review the research literature dealing with these questions and propose a methodology that approaches these challenges. Our overall goal is to make LDA topic modeling more accessible to communication researchers and to ensure compliance with disciplinary standards. Consequently, we develop a brief hands-on user guide for applying LDA topic modeling. We demonstrate the value of our approach with empirical data from an ongoing research project.

Constructing an illusion of scientific uncertainty? Framing climate change in German and British print media

Abstract This article uses quantitative content analysis data from June 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013 to examine the salience and construction of scientific uncertainty about climate change in German and British press coverage using quantitative content analysis data from June 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013. The results show that uncertainty about climate change − against overwhelming consensus among climate scientists − is prominent in the press coverage of both countries. The findings indicate that it is important to distinguish whether scientific uncertainty can be found at the level of single articles, or at the level of the coverage as a whole. The study also reveals that uncertainty is constructed differently in German and British press coverage in terms of the media’s framing of climate science and the types of actors who are involved in the construction of scientific uncertainty.

Do Conservative Media Provide a Forum for Skeptical Voices? The Link Between Ideology and the Coverage of Climate Change in British, German, and Swiss Newspapers

ABSTRACT This study analyzes whether the ideological orientation of a newspaper has an influence on the salience of skeptical arguments (trend, attribution, impact, and response skeptics) in the coverage of climate change in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, and examines whether certain newspaper titles act as advocates of the skeptical countermovement. A quantitative content analysis of a broad newspaper sample for each country over the course of one year (June 2012–May 2013) was conducted. The results reveal that conservative newspapers do not amplify skeptical voices in general; the difference between conservative and more liberal outlets is only found in the case of impact and response skepticism. Second, in each country, certain conservative newspapers are particularly open to skeptical arguments.

Homophily and prestige: An assessment of their relative strength to explain link formation in the online climate change debate

Abstract Previous work has shown that hyperlinks reflect actors’ strategic choices; these dyadic relationships depend on the actors’ exogenous attributes (e.g., homophily) and the network’s endogenous features (e.g., prestige distribution among actors). We combine these factors as explanatory variables in different exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to assess the relative strength of prestige and homophily for the actors’ link formation. We analyze the climate change discourse in a hyperlink network formed by US civil society actors from November 2014 and test how relevant the different factors are, including variables such as actor type, country, position, and topic. We find that both prestige and various aspects of homophily influence link formation online. With regard to the importance of the different factors, positional homophily stands out, followed by prestige and other homophily effects.

Politicization of science: how climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication.

This study, using the discussion about climate change in the USA as an example, analyzes the research question of how climate change skeptics use experts and scientific evidence in their online communication. Two different strategies are distinguished: legitimation and criticism. The study conducts a quantitative content analysis of online documents to answer the research question. The results show that the deduced strategies are an important part of the communication of climate change skeptics, who more commonly use the criticism strategy than the legitimation strategy. Results are further differentiated for different actor types and various types of experts.

Different actors, different factors? A comparison of the news factor orientation between newspaper journalists and civil-society actors

Abstract News factors can be conceptualized as general relevance indicators guiding the attention of all humans. However, that doesn’t mean that they are the only factors influencing selection processes or that all news factors have the same importance across different actor types. Within the concept of news factors it is still unclear to what degree those news factors also apply to the communication outside of traditional mass media. We therefore ask whether and how actors with varying degrees of professionalization employ news factors in their communication differently. To answer our research question, we conducted a quantitative content analysis and compared the coverage in traditional newspapers with the communication of civil society actors with varying degrees of professionalization. We analyzed the relevance of news factors within the presentation of a specific issue, namely climate change in Germany. Our results show that news factors are – at least partly – also applied by non-journalist actors. The mass media and the more professionalized civil society actors do not apply news factors more strongly to their communication than do non-professionalized civil society actors. Instead, we find that different actors focus on different news factors.

Die Selektion und der Austausch von Issues

Wie im vorherigen Kapitel beschrieben, gibt es innerhalb einer Gesellschaft verschiedene Systeme, die unterschiedliche Funktionen erfullen. Dadurch, dass die Systeme uber Issues als Strukturelement der Kommunikation miteinander verknupft sind, konnen Konflikte oder gesellschaftlich relevante Themen uber Issues ausgetragen und verhandelt werden.

Medien und Politik als gesellschaftliche Teilsysteme

Theoretische Grundlage ist das Verstandnis von Medien und Politik als gleichwertigen, gesellschaftlichen Teilsystemen. Das Denken in Systemen gehort laut Ruhl (1969, S. 185) „zum geschatzten und verbreiteten Erkenntnisinstrumentarium der Wissenschaften“ und hat sich innerhalb der letzten Jahrzehnte uber interdisziplinare Grenzen hinweg zu einem weit verbreiteten Paradigma entwickelt. Der grose Reiz der Systemtheorie liegt dabei unter anderem darin, dass mit ihrer Hilfe Prozesse und Strukturen verschiedener gesellschaftlicher Bereiche anhand des gleichen Begriffsinstrumentariums wiedergegeben und analysiert werden konnen und so fruchtbare Einblicke auch uber Fachgrenzen hinweg moglich werden.

Die Verarbeitung der selektierten Issues

In den vorherigen Kapiteln wurden die Genese und die Selektion eines Issues sowie mogliche Austauschbeziehungen der beiden Systeme auf dieser Ebene beschrieben. Dies ist jedoch nicht das zentrale Erkenntnisinteresse. Im Zentrum steht vielmehr die Frage, wie Issues, die als relevant erkannt wurden, in den jeweiligen Systemen intern weiterverarbeitet und transformiert werden. Die Genese beziehungsweise Selektion eines bestimmten Themas ist folglich Vorbedingung oder die ‚erste Stufe‘, die erfullt sein muss, damit das Issue weiterverarbeitet werden kann.