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Abstract
This study offers an analysis of news framing of ethanol stories, examining several key dimensions of framing. A content analysis of six national and regional newspapers indicates that ethanol has been presented largely as a policy issue, rather than a technology or an economic issue. We also found that the environment has been the key talking point in debating the issue. Overall, the story tone has become increasingly negative over the years. Drawing upon the notion of frame building, this study also explores some of the factors that may affect the media's selective use of frames.
Notes
1. Originally, we wanted to use a large number of various organizing themes employed in earlier studies of science and technology issues. In a study of news coverage of biotechnology, for example, Nisbet and Huge (2006) used a total of 12 organizing themes: new research, scientific background, patenting/ownership, economic impact, public accountability, public opinion/engagement, social progress, morality, scientific uncertainty, Pandora's Box, conflict/strategy, and middle way. For several reasons, however, we ended up collapsing these 12 categories into three larger organizing themes (science, economy, policy). First, some of these categories may overlap conceptually. For example, new research, scientific background, and scientific uncertainty may all organize an ethanol story as a science issue. Second, while more-detailed categorizations in previous studies may well apply to such issues as biotechnology or stem cell research, some of these subcategories (e.g., social progress, morality, public opinion/engagement, Pandora's Box) were found only in small numbers in ethanol stories, and thus could be coded simply as “Others.” In result, it was not possible to make a direct comparison in organizing themes between our findings and previous findings from other science issues, which otherwise would have become an important contribution to the literature.
2. As of January 2010, Iowa produced 3183 and Illinois produced 1383 million gallons of ethanol per year (RFA Citation2010b). In 2002, Texas and Louisiana together produced an average of 7.7 million barrels of oil per day out of the 16.5 million total produced in the United States (Burley Citation2009).
3. In Illinois, for example, The Chicago Tribune is the largest newspaper in circulation, but the newspaper is not available in Lexis-Nexis. The Chicago Sun-Times was selected as an alternative because it represents the second largest newspaper in the state and is also available in Lexis-Nexis. Similarly, The Telegraph Herald was selected because it is one of the few Iowa newspapers available in Lexis-Nexis. Both The Houston Chronicle and The Times-Picayune represent the largest newspapers in the states and are also available in the Lexis-Nexis database.
4. In fact, there is no universally accepted method of determining a desirable sample size. One possibility, though, is to calculate it using formulas for standard error and confidence interval (Neuendorf Citation2002). Because of the explorative nature of this study, we considered a confidence interval of ±4 percent to be good enough. When N=1174, a sample size of 397 gives a confidence interval of ±4 percent. We sampled 70 articles from each of the six newspapers, or a total of 420, to match this number (N=397).
5. The inter-coder reliability (Scott's pi) on the exclusion/inclusion of articles was 0.92 (N=70).
6. McNemar's chi-square assesses the significance of the difference in percentages between two variables.
7. A post-hoc analysis of our data indicated that the conflict/competition angle appeared in 72 percent (N=104) of articles that framed ethanol as a policy issue (N=144). The intercoder reliability (Scott's pi) for the conflict/competition angle was 0.82.