Conveying scientific information to the public accurately and comprehensively is one of the media's most important, yet difficult, responsibilities. Public support for, or opposition to, policies with a relatively large scientific component (e.g. environmental policies) may hinge upon the way problems and solutions are presented in the news. This doctoral research investigates the influence that scientists, via the media, may have in shaping public attitudes for the test issue of global climate change. Using both quantitative analyses of media coverage and experiments, this research explores how the framing of scientific consensus or disagreement in the news affects lay citizens' opinions. In particular, it examines how varying the depicted level of scientific agreement, presence of political cues, and strength of scientific evidence in media coverage affects cognitive message processing.
Numerous studies have documented that the news media routinely pair opposing expert opinions, even when overwhelming agreement about a problem exists in the scientific community. How citizens react to this conflicting information is relatively unexamined and thus poorly understood. This research will investigate how citizens make sense of scientific disagreement in the news, while also expanding the literature on elite influence to more fully include scientists. The central prediction is that scientific disagreement may actually discourage citizens from thinking carefully about scientific evidence, leading them to use content cues as shortcuts to determine their opinions about issues.
