Politicizing Media Coverage of Health and Science Lecture
This is right up my alley!! I’m super interested in every single one of these topics in the title of this event, so I’m happy to take time and visit the local university and learn. I’m so fortunate to live near such a great university and its way too cool to make up for all the times I didn’t pay attention while I was in my own University, and now just learn all I can from everything around me.
Why Attend: Let’s see what we can learn from this. Why not? I feel like it ties in perfectly with Kelly Tutors, media literacy, and culture.
Photo Collage and Commentary:
Notes from the Event:
I arrived right as she began (and then spent a moment writing the stuff above… usually I prepare more ahead of time, but this one slipped my planning). So let’s jump into what she’s talking about.
What does “politicization” mean?
counting references to political actors
building politics vs medical corporations
Are linguistics being used for medical or political purposes?
Messages from well-meaning scientists and researchers can be swayed. But political actors are at the center of this.
Politization is often about controversy. Often brought up at conferences or articles, so that it can be debated in a professional arena.
For example, the examination of climate change. The deniers vs believers. Are communicators more focused on the conflict? Controversy can be manufactured.
UNCERTAINTY: if the controvery part is about who is rgiht or who is wrong, this is more about the lack of confidence in scientific evidence.
How much do we know about the issue?
Science is “inherently problematic and ambiguous” with characteristics of scientific findings. There are margins of error.
So scientists try to guide and predict, interpret the results… but this can turn misleading intentionally.
The cautious culture of sciences leads researchers to express conclusions about climate change in mild terms, tempting complacency among the public,” - Mark Buchanan, 2020
BLAME: a discursive device for accountable allocation - to challenge or protect an existing social order. To legitimize particular actors as fixers. Blaming is close to politics, power, and responsibility.
selectively operates and targets the counterparty.
This can turn into scapegoating.
BTW, this woman speaks at a fantastic pace and is really easy to understand. Not reading off a script. (So often people are hard to follow, or speak too fast or read scripts. I’m loving her presentation)
And I don’t even think she’s a native speaker, so.. you see? Like - it’s so possible, just speak slow and don’t read off a script, people!! (versus the event I went to last night and even a few last week, which were impossible to keep up with)
So, how does the public view the issues and message in a politicized lens.
Interestingly, there has been no study to date that collects the two levels of politicization or examines how the message nad perception are connected.
We want to look at how attitudes or behavior affect the outcomes.
If people are pro-environmental and have the intention to engage with pro-environmental action. They may come up with two experimental groups (a control group) - an uplifting message about climate change (they use an example from the UN). Then they may use a fear appeal campaign. Elicit fear and highlight the replacement of wildlife with garbage with wildlife images on it.
How would they proceed with this experiment? They’d put participants into either condition. Then, after viewing it, they’ll be asked to what degree to reduce emissions by turning off AC or recycling, etc. After researches will compare the average responses from each of the conditions and thereby conclude that in this condition, people have higher levels of intention.
BTW, these two girls entered late and are just standing off to the side together. If they were to split up and sit alone, they could go get a seat. But they just want to be together, so they stand there - for the whole speech? Maybe
It’s just funny how much people want to stick with who they came with - and feel the need to attend things with someone, and then they end up standing up for a whole 1 hour speech
I used to know a girl with anorexia in my middle school who would stand during the entire class to burn more calories.
When people feel fear as manipulation, they don’t respond well. Feeling fear can vary among participants who receive this. It may vary because of their age, their understanding of climate change as the baseline. And feeling fear is out of control of the scientists. This makes me think of my Doomscrolling for Climate Change class - and how I should include a little mroe informationa bout what is in it. It’s an amazing class.
We can think of the direct effect of message cues on political health and political consequences. Perceived politicization can play as a mitigator of political consequences.
her colleagues and her focus on vaccine attitudes (brah, i don’t like it!!)
Perceived polarization: how Americans would view the democratic/republican views. They tend to overestimate the gap vs reality over many issues, which fuels animosity against each other.
They constructed a 30-message pool and randomly selected 4 messages from the pool. When the dimension is on (controversy, uncertainty, political discussion, blaming) as the cues.
This is SO amazing for my media/financial literacy class.
The display order was randomized, and this was an experiment they did, where each person would see each text in order.
They recruited people to experiment on and give messages - some got 4 politicized messages, some got 4 un-politicized messages.
Audience is interrupting and asking fi they’re all on a same page - but she said it was 4 messages in a row on one page, then after was 4 more messages. Not an article. Just 16 messages. Each message was driven by real-world tweets. Formatted as tweets. But used synonyms and randomly selected numbers for user engagement metrics. So that people were not influenced by names and assumed gender.
They had a demography of age, gender, race, education, and partisanship
430 19-34 year olds
35+ 1164
female 804
male 782
white 1206
non-white 388
democrats 707
independent 248
republican 639
high school or under 682
some college or associated 403
Bachelor's or above 609
SO what did they find? The direct effect on message cues were very limited.
among democrats, only one message cue was directly affected - uncertainty cues decreased their vaccine favorability,
but the same uncertainty cues did not effect replublics. Instead, it was blaming cues that increased their perceived polarization.
That was the only path they saw directly connected
Among democrats, on certain acute matters, uncertainty increased their perceived uncertainty. When tehy received uncertainty cues, they had less confidence in covid vaccines.
But perceived blaming and political discussion went down
For Republicans, controversy cues matter - it was the only one that increased controversy and political discussion
Okay… hahahh this isn’t making much sense to me. I may send this to AI really quick and get a summary. Cause if I’m confused - you may be too.
CLAUDE: “when a message sounds political, does that change how you receive it?
She tested 4 "politicization cues" — ways a message can feel political:
Controversy — framing something as a debate (two sides fighting)
Uncertainty — expressing doubt about the science
Blame — pointing fingers at who caused the problem
Political discussion — mentioning parties or political actors
What she found is that different cues trigger different reactions depending on your political identity.
Democrats: hearing uncertainty made them trust vaccines less. Because they trust science, so if scientists sound unsure, it rattles them.
Republicans: controversy framing increased their sense that it was a political fight — which made them dig in.
So basically — the same message lands differently depending on who's reading it and which political button it pushes.
For your media literacy work, the takeaway is simple: how something is framed changes what people do with it, independent of whether the underlying facts changed at all. That's the whole game of media manipulation in one study.”
She says: what do these results tell us?
Political discussion was widely used by being operationalized with political actors in the context. This message characteristic didn’t measure political attitudes in his study.
Instead, controversial cues increased the perception of political discussion among Republicans. Simple words like ‘opposition, conflict, disagreements, disputes,or feud’ activated republicans’ thoughts about politicians and speakers. a part of the political discussion - had a real impact on their political consequences
may imply relatively stronger links between two concepts among republicans than others
We need to refrain from words of controversy cues when activating this thought.
Among democrats, uncertainty message cues decreased the perceptions of other politicization dimensions
it directly and indirectly decreased democrats vaccine favorability.
indirectly decreased Democrats’ perceived and affective polarization.
So liberals are less confrontational to disagree than conservatives (Morey et al. 2012)
When we consider social media (which doesn’t always provide enough environment for engagement of the issues) we may not want to highlight scientific complexity. And then promote more health measures in a stronger way on social media platforms.
The implications of blame, among Republicans, blaming cues increased perceived polarization. Blaming cues could be strong enough to change one's views on the issues, but not strong enough to change how one views how others would view the issues.
The research did have limitations. You can not speak to people in confidence without indirect effects. Direct and indirect perception and outcome variable. They’re more correlated vs causeated.
In the real world, the use of multiple dimensions can coexist. Future research should examine multi-way interaction effects. Future researchers have the burden instead of me.
Other outcome variables may have different results. We will need to see.
Third, her approach of sampling stimuli from real-world examples can produce noise. A bunch of message codes for each condition, assigned to the same group. They all received different messages, randomly pulled from the pool.
This can produce noise, but we selected this noise. mroe conservative. There has been criticism of a single-message-reliant experiment. IT can be really restricted to this message stimulus.
Now its Q&A but i’m going to head downtown to go to an event about pitching + founders, then after that I have a little party to attend downtown at a restaurant with putt putt inside of it! lol.
