Mike S. Schäfer

Is the internet a better public sphere? Comparing old and new media in the USA and Germany:

Normative theorists of the public sphere, such as Jürgen Habermas, have been very critical of the ‘old’ mass media, which were seen as unable to promote free and plural societal communication. The advent of the internet, in contrast, gave rise to hopes that it would make previously marginalized actors and arguments more visible to a broader public. To assess these claims, this article compares the internet and mass media communication. It distinguishes three levels of both the offline and the online public sphere, which differ in their structural prerequisites, in their openness for participation and in their influence on the wider society. Using this model, the article compares the levels that are most strongly structured and most influential for the wider society: the mass media and communication as organized by search engines. Using human genome research and analysing Germany and the USA, the study looks at which actors, evaluations and frames are present in the print mass media and on websites, and finds that internet communication does not differ significantly from the offline debate in the print media.

From Public Understanding to Public Engagement An Empirical Assessment of Changes in Science Coverage

Science communication is said to have changed in the past decades. It is widely assumed that science is no longer merely transported and translated by the mass media to a passive audience, but “medialized”: Many authors believe that scientific issues are discussed extensively in the mass media nowadays, that these discussions are plural in its participants and in the arguments used, and that the issues at stake are evaluated controversially. It is still unclear, however, if this change applies to all science topics or only to some. The article at hand argues that science issues from different epistemic cultures can be expected to be “medialized” to different extents, and analyzes mass media coverage on stem cell research, human genome research, and neutrino research to underline this claim. The findings show that the described change only applies to some issues, and that further differentiation of the concept of “medialization” is necessary.

What drives media attention for climate change? Explaining issue attention in Australian, German and Indian print media from 1996 to 2010

The article identifies the drivers of media attention for climate change in three countries: Australia, Germany and India. It calculates the monthly amount of climate change-related coverage in two leading newspapers for each country in relation to all articles published in the respective newspapers over a 15-year time span (1996–2010). Based on an explanatory model derived from agenda setting theory, punctuated equilibrium theory and multiple streams theory, it uses time series regression analysis to assess the influence of weather and climate characteristics as well as various social events and feedbacks on issue attention. The results show that weather and climate characteristics are no important drivers for issue attention in two of the three countries, and that societal activity, particularly international climate summits and the agenda building efforts from international non-governmental organizations, has stronger impacts on issue attention.

Taking stock: a meta-analysis of studies on the media's coverage of science

The presentation of science in the mass media is one of the most important questions facing social scientists who analyse science. Accordingly, media coverage of science has been a constant focal point in the respective literature, and a flurry of such publications has appeared in the past few years. Yet the activity and growth of the respective research have not been accompanied by systematic overviews. This article aims to provide such an overview by means of a meta-analysis: it analyses existing studies systematically and provides an empirical overview of the literature. The analysis shows that while the research field grew significantly in the past few years and employs a variety of research strategies and methods, it has been biased in three ways: mainly natural sciences (and namely biosciences and medicine), Western countries, and print media have been analysed.

Multiple public spheres of Weibo: a typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China

The advent of online media, and particularly social media, has led to scholarly debates about their implications. Authoritarian countries are interesting in this respect because social media might facilitate open and critical debates that are not possible in traditional media. China is arguably the most relevant and interesting case in this respect, because it limits the influx of non-domestic social media communication, has established its own microcosm of social media and tries to closely monitor and control it and censor problematic content. While such censorship is very effective in some instances, however, it fails to shut down all open debates completely. We analyse the pre-eminent Chinese social media platform – Sina Weibo – and present a typology of different kinds of public spheres that exist on this platform in which open and critical debates can occur under specific circumstances: Thematic public spheres include phenomena of common concern, such as environmental pollution or food safety; short-term public spheres emerge after unexpected events; encoded public spheres are deliberate attempts of users to circumvent censorship; local public spheres focus on sub-national phenomena and problems; non-domestic political public spheres exist on political topics from other countries but are often referenced back to China; mobile public spheres exist because many people use Weibo on their smartphones and also have access to deleted content there and meta public spheres are debates about censorship itself.

Media Representations of Climate Change: A Meta-Analysis of the Research Field

A flurry of studies in recent years has analyzed the role of media in climate change communication. This article provides a systematic, large-scale, and up-to-date overview of the objects and characteristics of this research field through a meta-analysis. It identifies 133 relevant studies and analyzes them empirically. The results show that research activity has risen strongly over time, and that the analytical spectrum has expanded to include an increasing number of countries, more types of media including online and social media, and different methodological approaches. The analysis also demonstrates, however, that scholarship in the field still concentrates strongly on Western countries and print media.

Global warming’s five Germanys: A typology of Germans’ views on climate change and patterns of media use and information:

People’s attitudes toward climate change differ, and these differences may correspond to distinct patterns of media use and information seeking. However, studies extending analyses of attitude types and their specific media diets to countries beyond the United States are lacking. We use a secondary analysis of survey data from Germany to identify attitudes toward climate change among the German public and specify those segments of the population based on their media use and information seeking. Similar to the Global Warming’s Six Americas study, we find distinct attitudes (Global Warming’s Five Germanys) that differ in climate change–related perceptions as well as in media use and communicative behavior. These findings can help tailor communication campaigns regarding climate change to specific audiences.

International terrorism, domestic coverage?

The article analyzes to what extent news reporting on terrorist attacks globalized, regionalized, or country specific. We compare coverage on four terrorist incidents in the main news shows of the US edition of CNN, of Al Jazeera’s Arabic language service, of the British BBC, and of the German ARD. The analysis shows cross-national similarities in several dimensions: the analyzed media devote nearly identical amounts of attention to the four events, employ similar stylistic devices to describe them, and evaluate them similarly. At the same time, there are notable differences. These differences are not found between Western channels and Al Jazeera – as proponents of a ‘clash of civilizations’ might expect – but between CNN and Al Jazeera on the one hand, and the BBC and ARD on the other. The former interpret the attacks as an expression of a global “war on terror”, whereas the latter see them as criminal attacks by a few individuals against the human civilization itself.

Gender Equality in the European Union: The EU Script and its Support by European Citizens

The article analyses attitudes of European citizens towards gender equality. It describes how the EU script on gender relations emphasizes gender equality. Subsequently, the article analyses the extent to which citizens of different European countries agree with this idea, based on Eurobarometer data.The analyses show a strong overall support for gender equality in the economic, political, and educational realms, but also differences between countries. In explaining these differences, we go beyond other studies not only by concentrating on endogenous characteristics of the analysed countries, but also by taking into account their levels of modernization, institutionalized gender regimes, and religious composition. Moreover, following neo-institutionalist theory, we include an exogenous variable — the influence of the EU — in multi-level analyses and can show that, in addition to all endogenous variables, it also has an effect on attitudes towards gender relations.

Two normative models of science in the public sphere: human genome sequencing in German and US mass media

The public sphere and particularly the mass media have become increasingly important for the legitimation of science. Many publications on the issue explicitly or implicitly deal with the question of how science should be treated in the mass media, putting forward normative models of an ideal “scientific public sphere.” In this article, we first present two ideal types of normative models identified in the literature: the “science-dominated scientific public sphere” and the “contextualized scientific public sphere.” Whereas the first model calls for scientific dominance in mass media debates, the second model argues that science should be contextualized also with non-scientific actors and arguments. The second part of the article outlines how these two models translate into specific demands for mass media debates and proposes how to measure whether concrete cases of science coverage correspond with one of the normative models. We confront the two normative models with the example of media coverage on human genome research in Germany and in the United States in the third part of the article. Our findings show that the mass media debate on this issue is dominated by bio-scientists, affirmative positions, and scientific and medical frames in both countries. Hence, human genome research as an empirical case corresponds to the demands of the scientific dominance model, while failing to meet the demands for more contextualized mass media coverage.