Benefits and risks of genetically modified mosquitoes: news and Twitter framing across issue-attention cycle

Abstract

This study examines how online news and Twitter framed the discussion about genetically modified mosquitoes differently in response to Zika as the issue-attention cycle progressed. Results show that Twitter discussions relied on recurring frames. By contrast, online news media used a wider variety of benefit and risk frames than Twitter, which helped generate new knowledge. The issue-attention cycle did make a difference in the frame used. We observed a dramatic decline in benefit coverage in Twitter but not in online news media coverage. For Twitter, risk coverage spiked in the middle stages of the cycle. There was nearly no mention of risk at the beginning and ending stages of the cycle in Twitter coverage. Online news media presented a different pattern that benefit coverage was constantly high and risk coverage stably increased as the issue-attention cycle progressed. Implications are discussed in light of the media characteristics.

Keywords:

• Framing
• issue-attention cycle
• genetically modified mosquitoes
• Twitter
• online news

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In total, we used online news from 55 media organizations. They were 1) the organizations that produced more than 10 articles on the topic: abc27.com, abcnews.go.com, ad-hoc-news.de, beaumontenterprise.com, beforeitsnews.com, bioportfolio.com, biospace.com, Caymannewsservice.com, Chron.com, cinemablaze.com, cnn.com, ctpost.com, dailymail.co.uk, fairfieldcitizenonline.com, finance.yahoo.com, foxnews.com, greenwichtime.com, ieyesnews.com, in.reuters.com, leadercall.com, learningandfinance.com, msn.com, my.earthlink.net, mysanantonio.com, naturalnews.com, nbc4i.com, newcanaannewsonline.com, news.caribseek.com, newstimes.com, popherald.com, reuters.com, sfgate.com, sott.net, stamfordadvocate.com, thevillagesuntimes.com, time.com, timesunion.com, utcecho.com, wkrg.com, wtnh.com, yahoo.com; and 2) the popular news organizations in the Pew Center Research report if not included in the previous list: mashable.com, businessinsider.com, buzzfeed.com, cbsnews.com, huffingtonpost.com, latimes.com, nbcnews.com, nytimes.com, telegraph.co.uk, theguardian.com, usatoday.com, vox.com, washingtonpost.com. A major portion of the media organizations was US media while some were from other countries. Similarly, in our Twitter sample 48.2% of tweets were from US users, 27.9% were unidentified, and 23.9% were from other countries worldwide.

2 Because of the infrequency of many frames in the Twitter coverage, we conducted chi-square analyses only on the frames with a sufficient number of tweets in all stages that did not violate the statistical assumption. In other words, we included the following frames for analysis at different stages of the issue-attention cycle: health benefits, health risks, environmental risks and ethical risks.