Whose Authority Drives the Narrative?: Framing the Spread of Mountain Pine Beetle in Canadian News Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Climate change is facilitating the expansion of biorisks (invasive species, viruses, diseases) into new environments. While news media are a key site where expert authorities communicate about risks in the public sphere, there is limited understanding of how media narratives change as biorisks spread into new areas. We use mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) in Canada as a case study to examine how narratives in media coverage evolved as outbreaks intensified and spread eastward. Medical narratives were more common in British Columbia, where the beetle is endemic, and war narratives were more common in Alberta, where the beetle spread and is considered a “native invasive” species. Narrative framing in both places was driven by journalists, while quotes by authoritative sources lent support to journalistic framing. These findings demonstrate that affective narrative frames are widespread in environmental crisis communication and that framing of crises changes dynamically based on geographic context.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".