News media and food scares: the case of contaminated salmon

Abstract In 2004, Science published a study on organic contaminants in farmed salmon. The study had a clear normative message and worked strategically and successfully to gain worldwide media attention. In this article, we investigate global media coverage of the study. The varying types of attention and different framings of selected national broadsheets in 14 countries are analysed. (Framing is where a complex and often uncertain reality is simplified in order to support a specific understanding of the issue and/or push an agenda.) The results show that even if the scientists and the sponsor of the study had a clear ambition to publicize and disseminate their results and normative proposals to the wider society, the newspapers did not act as a passive medium for distributing the original message. Instead, diverging understandings and framings were developed. By way of conclusion, it is stated that ambitious strategies for attracting media attention may be successful in terms of media coverage; this does not, however, mean that the message is passively transmitted. The national context and the logic of media cause issues to be framed in specific ways with the aim of telling stories and catching the attention of the reader.

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