GM Crops in Hungary: Comparing Mass Media Framing and Public Understanding of Technoscientific Controversy

Abstract

In Hungary, there has been limited public debate about genetically modified crops, unlike in some Western countries. The mass media has published little to inform Hungarian lay people about genetically modified (GM) crops or their relevance to the country. Nevertheless, the media did convey some general impressions, mainly from within an Anti-GM Threat framing of the issue. This mass media frame was evident in lay focus group discussions—e.g. GM crops branded a food risk, general focus on risks, health risk identified as important risk, foreign companies regarded as source of the problem and as being ‘just out for profit’, image of corn, rhetoric of deterioration, etc. This overlap supports theories which suggest that media framings provide a resource which can be appropriated for public understanding. At the same time, however, dominant media framings were also mentioned only vaguely or in a somewhat modified way. Other issues raised in the media framing, not resonating with wider cultural themes, were absent from focus group discussions (e.g. environmental concerns). And participants were also able to rely on other conversational resources (analogous reasoning and cultural themes) to formulate some additional issues beyond the media reportage.

Key Words:

• GM crops
• public understanding of biotechnology
• genetically modified crops
• media framing

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude to Jenny Kitzinger, Susanna Priest, Cynthia Coleman, Les Levidow, Kean Birch and Roland Keszi for their constructive suggestions. The research project reported in this paper was funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), and the author was supported for her work during the project by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences with a János Bolyai Grant.

Notes

1 Insights into the Hungarian context in the introductory paragraphs are based on a background study (Vicsek and Gergely, 2012) which involved the study of the legal regulation, websites of political parties and environmental organizations, and interviews and consultations conducted with GM experts, scientists, activists, ministry officials and actors of the media field.

2 Another factor accounting for some congruence between media content and PUS could be that actors in both arenas of the public sphere can rely on shared cultural understandings, broader cultural themes, schemas which are common to most people within a given society (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). However, the issue here is, how do people choose which broader cultural theme and schema they mobilize in case of new technologies? In some of these cases, the media can provide starting points for these associations. The associations can then trigger a way of thinking and mobilize the employment of certain cultural schemas on behalf of the public. If GM is associated with food that can lead to the mobilization of a different set of concerns than if it was associated, for example, with industrial use or medicine (Hughes et al., 2008).

3 Six of the focus groups were moderated by the author; two focus groups were moderated by a Ph.D. student, Zita Nagy, following the instructions of the author.

4 In the quotations English names were used for the participants (in order to preserve confidentiality they are not translations of the original names).

5 This theme has been shown to appear in the construction of the GM issue by lay people in other societies as well and also in the arguments of stakeholders (Bonfadelli et al., 2002; Shaw, 2002; Parales-Quenza, 2004; Hughes et al., 2008; Levidow and Boschert, 2011). Although in some of these cases the media coverage within the society could have contributed more to this theme being raised. However, in Colombia that was probably not the case, as there the media coverage was extremely minimal (Parales-Quenza, 2004).