ABSTRACT
Media representations of techno-scientific advances are important pointers towards understanding how cultures differ in what is regarded as acceptable (Haran et al., 2007). The media provide an important source of information about new medical and scientific research, and often are the arena within which policy battles are fought (Wellcome Trust, 1998). As a result, the media are sometimes the focus of intense lobbying from powerful interested parties. There is, of course, no necessary correlation between public opinion, discourse, or policy, but the media do influence which, and how, events get defined as public issues (Petersen, 2002). The media do not intentionally deceive or mislead their audiences, but necessarily limit what they receive. They frame stories through the selective presentation of one set of themes, oppositions, ‘facts’, and knowledge-claims as compared to others. Sometimes, while some new issues are highlighted, as with the debate surrounding the cloning of Dolly, or the use of spare human embryos for stem cell research, only the rhetoric changes to reflect and little else. Kitzinger and her colleagues conclude their study of how the bioethical debates surrounding embryonic stem cell research were framed between 2000 and 2005, by observing that:
[A]lthough a major controversy was aired, many fundamental questions were left unaddressed. The coverage left the existing system of medicine and the scientific enterprise itself largely unchallenged. Although appearing to represent a range of conflict, certain positions, including the position of ambivalence, were largely silenced. Although including quotes from an apparently wide range of ‘balanced’ sources, some voices were systematically marginalised.
