Politicization is frequently employed as an analytic concept to explain the relationships between politics and media coverage of climate change. However, relatively few works explore how different notions of politicization are mobilized by actors in media discourses themselves. This article does so via a framing analysis of climate change coverage in Canadian newspapers. I investigate how different relationships between science and politics are conceived and associated with varying positions on climate change. In particular, I examine a supposition in science and technology studies that the media remains committed to deficit models and thus uncritically reproduces the authority of science. Scientistic discourses exist but among a diversity of politicization framings. A key finding is that the strongest appeals to scientific neutrality are associated with climate skepticism. This casts light on the nuanced, strategic \"politics of politicization\" in climate change debates. A more fine-grained and reflexive approach to politicization discourses can help identify productive interventions.

Employing a qualitative content analysis of online comments made on YouTube and letters to the editor published in US newspapers, we examine the deployment and neutralization of the evil corporation master frame in debates on two distinct biotechnologies, vaccines and genetically modified organisms. This study builds on previous research by outlining three diagnostic components of the evil corporation master frame: dishonesty, greed, and the contamination of authority. It also finds that supporters of vaccines and genetically modified organisms seek to neutralize the evil corporation master frame through aggressive, defensive, endurance, and redemptive framings. This study provides ideational detail for the ways that controversial biotechnology is constructed. The particularly vexing anti-vaccine movement is not dissimilar from other challenges to mainstream science as disparate movements draw on the same master frame. It also demonstrates how defenses of genetically modified organisms and vaccines tend to reify the anti-corporate stigma that sustains challenges to scientific authority.

Public Understanding of Science is an interdisciplinary journal serving the scholarly community and practitioners. This article reports an analysis of the readability and jargon in articles published in Public Understanding of Science throughout its almost three decades of existence to examine trends in accessibility to diverse audiences. The accessibility of Public Understanding of Science articles published in 1999/2000 (47), 2009 (49) and 2019 (65) was assessed in terms of readability and use of jargon. Readability decreased and use of jargon increased between 1999 and 2000 and the two following decades for empirical and non-empirical papers, and all parts including the abstracts. An analysis of rare words shows that most are not part of the general academic vocabulary or disciplinary jargon, but rather words that appeared only in one article. Public Understanding of Science has moved away from everyday language. This does not mean it is incomprehensible to its scholarly readership, but may have consequences to other audiences such as practitioners.

This randomized controlled experiment (N = 707) is the first to examine the role of video, source and user attributes in credibility assessment of online science news videos, and the impact of web-search on this role. We created a science news YouTube video in 12 versions (3 × 2 × 2 for source, quality and popularity). Each participant was randomly assigned to one version and was asked to rate the credibility of the source and the scientific information presented in the video. We found that perceived credibility is positively associated with perceived quality, as well as users\' YouTube experience. For those participants who did not conduct an online search during the assessment task, there was a positive association between the presenter\'s perceived credibility and the video\'s perceived credibility as well as its popularity; however, such associations were not present for participants who did conduct an online search.

This essay describes the ethos (i.e. the character projected to specific audiences) of the 25 Nobel Lectures in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine given in 2013-2015 and the 15 Presentation Speeches given at the Nobel Banquets between 2011 and 2015. A thematically focused qualitative analysis grounded in theories of epideictic discourse indicates the Nobel speakers demonstrated a range of strategies for and degrees of success in negotiating the tensions created by the implicit demands of ceremonial speeches, the scientific emphasis on didactic style and research content, and the different potential audiences (scientific experts and interested publics). Relatively few speeches explicitly displayed goodwill toward humanity instead of primarily toward the scientific community. Some speakers emphasized qualities of goodness in line with social values shared by broad audiences, but some reinforced stereotypes of scientists as anti-social. Speakers were variable in their ability to bridge the substantial gaps in resources for shared good sense.

Members of the lay public often draw from vernacular science knowledge-or metaphors, images, and terms related to technical science-to make normative assessments about behavior. Yet, little is known about vernacular science knowledge in terms of its forms and functions. In a national survey, US adults ( N = 688) were asked to identify an ideal age for first pregnancy, and to explain their decision. Participants drew from arguments related to hormonal processes, the language of risk, and the quality and quantity of \"eggs\" to navigate and identify an ideal timeline for first pregnancy. Their responses illustrated patterns of justification that involved the (a) employment of scientific concepts as heuristic cues for critical analysis, (b) conflation of details, and (c) synecdochal explication. These findings reveal some of the key ways in which vernacular science knowledge may shape the trajectory of lay argument in a range of contexts.

This article explores the origins and ideology of classical crowd psychology, a body of theory reflected in contemporary popularised understandings such as of the 2011 English \'riots\'. This article argues that during the nineteenth century, the crowd came to symbolise a fear of \'mass society\' and that \'classical\' crowd psychology was a product of these fears. Classical crowd psychology pathologised, reified and decontextualised the crowd, offering the ruling elites a perceived opportunity to control it. We contend that classical theory misrepresents crowd psychology and survives in contemporary understanding because it is ideological. We conclude by discussing how classical theory has been supplanted in academic contexts by an identity-based crowd psychology that restores the meaning to crowd action, replaces it in its social context and in so doing transforms theoretical understanding of \'riots\' and the nature of the self.

This article explores science journalism in the context of the media competition for readers\' attention. It offers a qualitative stylistic perspective on how popular journalism colonizes science communication. It examines a sample of 400 headlines collected over the period of 15 months from the ranking of five \'most-read\' articles on the website of the international magazine New Scientist. Dominant lexical properties of the sample are first identified through frequency and keyness survey and then analysed qualitatively from the perspective of the stylistic projection of newsworthiness. The analysis illustrates various degrees of stylistic \'hybridity\' in online popularization of scientific research. Stylistic patterns that celebrate, domesticate or personalize science coverage (characteristic of popular journalism) are intertwined with devices that foreground tentativeness, precision and informativeness (characteristic of science communication). The article reflects on the implications of including various proportions of academic and popular styles in science journalism.

Hopke and Simis ( Public Understanding of Science, online 4 October 2015) find that #fracking, the most popular of five shale-related hashtags analyzed from a 2013 period, is associated with pro-shale attitudes only 13% of the time and note that the dominant voice of the activist community, coupled with a lack of engagement from industry, is unexpected. This comment offers additional perspective on the sentiment- and actor-skewed result by noting that the term \"fracking\" is highly political, specifically because the spelling \"frack\" versus \"frac\" is associated with activism. Furthermore, in public speech, the industry tends to deemphasize the hydraulic fracturing process in favor of the product, consistent with the findings that #natgas is a relatively pro-industry hashtag.

The importance of evaluating deliberative public engagement events is well recognized, but such activities are rarely conducted for a variety of theoretical, political and practical reasons. In this article, we provide an assessment of the criteria presented in the 2008 National Research Council report on Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making (NRC report) as explicit indicators of quality for the 2012 \'Advanced Biofuels\' deliberative democracy event. The National Research Council\'s criteria were selected to evaluate this event because they are decision oriented, are the products of an exhaustive review of similar past events, are intended specifically for environmental processes and encompass many of the criteria presented in other evaluation frameworks. It is our hope that the results of our study may encourage others to employ and assess the National Research Council\'s criteria as a generalizable benchmark that may justifiably be used in forthcoming deliberative events exploring different topics with different audiences.