UNDERSTANDING NEWS MEDIA PROCESSES AND VALUES TO PROMOTE COMMUNITY SUPPORT OF GEOSCIENCE

Geology, as with most of the sciences, rarely attracts the interest of the news media. To successfully attract and sustain the media's interest, geologists must understand how and why journalists select news stories. Through a process known to communication scholars as agenda setting, the nation's news media decide what will be reported as “news” each day. Reporters and editors function as gatekeepers of information, sorting out what information will be relayed to the public and what will be discarded. Often topics of real interest and concern to geologists never make it through the gate. Instead earth scientists are primarily called on to relate changes in local weather patterns to global climate change or hypothesize about future natural disasters -- all in 30-second sound bites. Rarely are geologists given the opportunity to give a true geoscience perspective that would put these issues in a broader context.

The communication theories of agenda setting and gatekeeping help explain the process journalists use in selecting what the public sees on the nightly news and reads in their morning newspaper. Only by first understanding the news process and then the corresponding news values can geologists attempt to push through these media gatekeepers and appear on the national news agenda. Journalists use clearly identified standards to determine news value. These standards include timeliness, prominence, proximity, conflict, currency, and the bizarre. Framing issues in terms of these news values increases the likelihood that a broader geoscience perspective will appear before the public.