DOCUMENT RESUME ED 362 922 CS 508 356 TITLE Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (76th, Kansas City, Missouri, August 11-14, 1993). Part X: Health, Science, and the Environment. INSTITUTION Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. PUB DATE Aug 93 NOTE 301p.; For other sections of these proceedings, see CS 508 347-362. For 1992 proceedings, see ED 349 608 623. PUB TYPE Collected Works - Conference Proceedings (021) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC13 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; *Audience Response; Communication Research; *Information Sources; *Mass Media Role; Media Research; *News Reporting IDENTIFIERS Consumers; *Environmental Reporting; *Health Communication; News Sources; Public Service Advertising; Risk Assessment; Science News ABSTRACT The Health, Science, and the Environment section of this collection of conference presentations contains the following 10 papers: "Telling Stories about Superfund Sites" (Sharon Dunwoody and Robert J. Griffin); "Understanding Audience Reactions to AIDS Messages: An Adaptation of the Meaning-Based Model" (Sujatha Sosale); "Newspapers Provide Functional Information in Controversial Contexts for Consumers To Act: A Study about a Hazardous Waste Incinerator Issue at East Liverpool, Ohio" (Juanita Evans Dailey); "The Waron Drugs: A Constructionist View" (Michael P. McCauley and Edward R. Frederick); "Packaging Dissent: Radical Environmentalism, Television News, and Ideological Containment" (Rick Clifton Moore); "Dimensions Influencing Risk Perception: The Case of Lung Mseases" (Leandro L. Batista and Dulcie Straughan); "Reacting to the 'S' Word: Newspaper Type, Community Location and Coverage of Suicide News" (Marshel D. Rossow); "The Plague' over Time: A Longitudinal Study of How Newspaper Type and Community Location Have Influenced Basic Decisions about AIDS Reporting" (Marshel D. Rossow); "Take A Bite Out of Problems: PSA Research Reviewed and Extended" (Virginia Roark); and "Media, Opinion, and Global Warming: An Agenda-Setting Study ofan Environmental Issue, 1988-1992." (Craig Trumbo). *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best thatcan be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR EDUCATION IN JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION (76TH, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, AUGUST 11-14, 1993). PART X : HEALTH, SCIENCE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Moe of Educationai Re March and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS CENTER (ERIC) MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTEDBY Nia Thus document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization onginating it 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduchon Quality Points of view or opinions stated in this docu- ment do not necessarily represent official OE RI positron or policy TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)." BESI COPY AVAILABLE 1 Telling Stories About Superfund Sites Sharon Dunwoody School of Journalism and Mass Communication University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI 53706 USA Robert J. Griffin College of Communication, Journalism and Performing Arts Marquette University Milwaukee, WI 53233 USA Presented to SCIgroup session, Association for Education in Journal it;fri and Mass Communication annual meeting, Kansas City, August 1993 3 2 Telling Stories About Superfund Sites* Reporting on environmental contamination presents journalists with enormous challenges. For one, pollutants often constitute health hazards, saddling reporters with the task of explaining the extent and nature of those risks. For another, pollution problems usually come wrapped in highly technical language, making explanation ofeven the simplest phenomenon difficult indeed. For yet another, environmental contaminatibn, like other environmental issues, is awash in ambiguities. Experts rarely seem to know whata particular chemical does in a particular situation, and even when they claim to know, they may disagree. Finally, this kind of environmental issue can take years to resolve, a disconcerting state of affairs for an occupationjournalism--that wants to limit itself to what :appened today. In this study we characterize some of the ways journalists cope with coverage of a specific class of long-term environmental risks: Superfund sites in the United States. Specifically, we explore the development of the ways that media organizations interpreted the newsworthy attributes of three contaminated sites in Wisconsin, starting from their designation as Superfund sites some years ago. We interpret our data through the lenses of three conceptual frameworks. The first is the concept of schema or frame,an individual- level cognitive structure that guides a journalist's process of "making sense" ofa story. The other two concepts are factors that could strongly govern the construction of journalistic frames: occupational norms and community structures. Theoretical Framework Frames All individuals interpret their world by calling on knowledge structures thatare acquired through shared social learning, individual experiences, and personal reasoning (Graber, 1988). If two individuals who encounter workers toppling a large, aged tree in *This paper is based on research funded by the U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Agency under Cooperative Agreement CR-817599-01-0. A more detailed discussion of these findings is available in a book chapter Sharon Dunwoody and Robert J. Griffin, "Journalistic Strategies for Reporting Long-Term Environmental Issues: A Case Study of Three Superfund Sites," in Anders Hansen, ed., The Mass Media and Environmental Issues.Leicester University Press, 1993. 4 3 their neighborhood react differently, they may do so in part because that event has activated two very different interpretive schemata, or frames. One person may view the scenario with relief because she defines the tree as a potential hazard that strong winds may send crashing onto nearby homes. The other, conversely, may react to the process with sadness since he views the tree as a grand.' old survivor of pre-settlement days. "Humans," says Mendelsohn (1990, p. 38), "act Eccording to what they know and understand (or misunderstand), and not necessarily according to what they simply see or hear." These mental maps come in varying levels of sophistication across individuals and, for any one person, will differ in level of detail across topics. The important point is that they play a crucial role in sense-ma'-ing. Things in our world have meaning only to the extent that they get incorporated into these customized frames. Journalists, too, make sense of their world by incorporating stimuli into their available cognitive maps (Gitlin, 1980; Stocking and Gross, 1989). However, they employ frames not only to interpret phenomena for themselves but also to construct the stories that we encounter in our daily newspaper or TV news reports. "A frame," say Tankard et al. (1991, p. 5), "is a central organizing idea for news that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration." These frames are essential for journalistic work because reporters and editors must make speedy decisions about what in their environment is worth their attention. A journalist with 30 minutes to write a story does not spend much time contemplating "what the story is about." That particular decision is made in seconds, and the reporter then uses the bulk of her 30 minutes to select and order information in ways that are consonant with the chosen meaning framework Considerable evidence suggests that the frames that journalists use for story construction are not idiosyncratic (e.g., Rachlin, 1988; van Dijk, 1988). Rather, journalists across a wide range of media seem to employ similar mental maps and, thus, produce stories that reconstitute the world in similar ways. Evidence is growing that those frames influence the ways in which stories about science and environment are constructed for public consumption. For example, when a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island sprang a leak in 1979, many media organizations defined the event initially as "an accident" and sent general reportersindividuals adept at covering fast-breaking news--to the scene.It was not until many of these journalists began floundering in a sea of technical terms and terrifying imagesfor example, the ominous hydrogen bubble that was hypothesized to be growing inside the damaged reactorthat these organizations redefined the event and sent in their science reporters. Rubin, who headed a subsequent3westigation of media coverage of TMI, 4 reported that journalists' information-gathering effortswere so accident-oriented during the crisis that "science writers had little opportunity to ask sophisticated questions of knowledgeable sources" (Rubin, 1980:. Similarly, a study of journalists' coverage of social science research topics byWeiss and Singer (1988) found that reporters rarely defined the topics they dealt withas belonging to the domain of science ST of scientific disciplines but, instead, framed themas "crime stories" or "poll stories." The absence of a "science" frame, then, made theuse of scientific information rare in these accounts. For example, ifa journalist decided to write a story about the homeless, he might very well frame it