1027 publications found
The objective of this article is to present a panorama of the way in which journalistic coverage of science and technological themes is being carried out in Latin America, having as a case study seven newspapers of significant impact in the region. We analyzed all stories published by the science section during all the month of April 2004, in the following newspapers: La Nación, Argentina; El Mercurio, Chile; Mural, Mexico; El Comercio, Ecuador; O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo and Jornal do Commercio/Pernambuco, Brazil. A total of 482 texts were collected. The methodology joins quantitative and qualitative analysis. There are very few studies on science journalism in Latin America and even fewer that seek to explore a comparison among countries. We believe that studies such as ours can provide subsidies to stimulate the improvement of journalistic coverage of scientific and technological issues.
The historian Marshall Berman wrote that living in modern times means "to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation [...] and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know".
Several researchers operating in the sociological field have recently theorised that genetics and biotechnologies are at the core of the public perception of science. The present study aims at verifying empirically whether or not this is mirrored in Italian mass media, as well as at analysing the topics most frequently present in Italian newspapers and the economic and editorial reasons behind the results of editorial choices. Besides, it provides statistics about the major Italian newspapers published in the last third of 2002. This period has been chosen because some important news was published in December: it consequently offered the chance to carry out a long-term analysis as well as a study of the most important differences - in content and editorial lay-out - between scientific articles which are published in the appropriate sections inside the newspaper and those which make the front page. Ours are going to be purely quantitative considerations; but, from the point of view of the content, the data are sufficient to identify various narrative currents. These currents could be the object of further research on the frames used to contextualize the news and the reasons (anthropological, socio-cultural and editorial) for the way they are used by editorial staffs.