Marginal voices in the media coverage of controversial health interventions: how do they contribute to the public understanding of science?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the media are a significant source of information for the public on science and technology, journalists are often accused of providing only a partial picture by neglecting the points of view of vulnerable stakeholders. This paper analyzes the press coverage of four controversial health interventions in order to uncover what voices are treated marginally in the media and what the relative contributions of these voices are to the stories being told. Our empirical study shows that: 1) patterns of source utilization vary depending on the health intervention and less dominant stakeholders are in fact represented; and 2) the use of marginal voices fills certain information gaps but the overall contribution of such voices to the controversies remains limited. In order to strengthen the media coverage of science and technology issues, we suggest that further research on journalistic practices: 1) move beyond the dichotomy between journalists and scientists, and 2) explore how different categories of readers appraise the meaning and relevance of media content.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it