Expert perceptions of media reporting on a large-scale environmental risk issue: insights from mountain pine beetle management in Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The media play a key role in communicating risk issues and serve as a link between experts and the public. In this study, we explore experts’ perspectives on the role of the media and media content with respect to a mountain pine beetle (MBP; Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) epidemic in western Canada. We collected data using an internet-based survey of 59 MPB experts in 2009 and 1628 articles from local, regional, and national newspapers from 2000 to 2008. Survey findings show that experts do not have a favourable view of media reporting of MPB. In our media analysis, we found that the media are used effectively by experts to disseminate MPB risk information and to justify a swift response and control measures. Most articles reported information presented to them by government and industry. We conclude that the media played primarily an educational role and gave limited attention to fostering public dialogue on MPB management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".