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Searching for a Frame : News Media Tell the Story of Technological Progress, Risk, and Regulation
David A. Weaver, Erica Lively and Bruce Bimber Science Communication 2009 31: 139 DOI: 10.1177/1075547009340345 The online version of this article can be found at: http://scx.sagepub.com/content/31/2/139

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Articles

Searching for a Frame

News Media Tell the Story of Technological Progress, Risk, and Regulation
David a.Weaver erica Lively Bruce Bimber
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Science Communication Volume 31 Number 2 December 2009 139-166 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/1075547009340345 http://scx.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

How are the news media framing nanoscale science and technology? Primary concerns in the literature have been how news media weigh risks and benefits and how they classify nano with respect to news categories such as business, culture, discovery, or medicine. The authors contribute a new perspective by focusing on issue frames involving how stories imply responsibility for societal outcomes from technology. The authors develop four issue frames for stories about nanoscale science and technology: progress, regulation, conflict, and generic risk. These cut across the frame classifications and story tone assessments employed previously in the literature. Using data from the 10 largest U.S. newspapers for 1999-2008, the frequency of each frame over time is assessed. This study found that progress and generic risk frames, which deemphasize actors and responsibilities, dominated early coverage of nano but that frames involving regulation and the interplay of market incentives and regulatory responsibility mainly supplanted progress frames by 2007. Keywords: framing, frames, nanotechnology, technology, progress, regulation

ews media have been producing stories about nanoscience and technology for at least a decade, beginning intensively at the time of President Clintons proposal for a U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000. News coverage of nanoscale science and technology has reportedly grown over time (Friedman & egolf, 2005), and the stories in the english language press now number in the thousands (Weaver & Bimber, 2008).
Authors Note: Bruce Bimber, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, Ca 93106, USa 139

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This body of news provides an opportunity to examine how the media have responded to a novel science-oriented news topic that appears to be growing in salience. Nanotechnology encompasses the manipulation of matter at the scale of 100 nanometers or less, a domain exhibiting a great many thermal, optical, and electromechanical properties that are novel and sometimes even startling. a great deal of buildup has been made by some nanoscale scientists and engineers about the potentially revolutionary applications of this technology in electronics and computing, medicine, energy, and a wide range of consumer products from textiles to cosmetics, among others. at the same time, many concerns have been raised about potential problems and the need for caution. For news media and others communicating with the public, nanotechnologies present an intersection of issues involving the environment, human health, risk, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. accordingly, a number of possible approaches to communicating about nanotechnology are available to news media. How are journalists framing stories about nanotechnologies? Research so far on the framing of nano news has explored issues associated with risk communication and has focused chiefly on analyzing story tone and the relative emphasis on risks as opposed to benefits. This work has shown that newspapers have generally adopted a positive attitude toward nanotechnology and tend to emphasize benefits over risks (anderson, allan, Petersen, & Wilkinson, 2005; Friedman & egolf, 2005; Wilkinson, allan, anderson, & Petersen, 2007). a plurality of stories describe nano in terms of scientific advance, followed by discussions of the ethical, legal, or social implications (eLSIs; anderson et al., 2005; Stephens, 2005; Wilkinson et al., 2007). Findings about the tone and emphasis of stories are well summarized by anderson et al. (2005): The overall picture conveyed is one of a mixture of strong optimism in relation to the benefits of nanotechnology combined with concerns about the risks and uncertainties about possible benefits or risks (p. 213).1 The literature on nano in the news media has not, however, examined in any depth how the news media frame causal stories or attribute responsibility for possible outcomes or remedies. Framing theory (entman, 1993; Iyengar, 1991; Nelson, Clawson, & Oxley, 1997) provides reasons to expect that as nanotechnology emerges onto the public agenda, citizen reaction as well as responses by policymakers will be shaped not only by the positive or negative valence of news coverage and the weighing of risks and benefits in news but also by the kind of larger causal stories that are implied in news framesthat is, by how frames imply who is doing what to whom.

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For example, one way journalists might frame nanotechnology development would be to depict it as a case of the routine process of scientific discovery and technological progress. This kind of issue frame might prime positive beliefs about societal improvement from technology and might also imply that new technology is natural or logical, diminishing in salience the interests and decisions of particular actors who might be accountable for problems or risks, as well as benefits. Or a very different way to frame nanotechnology would be to depict it as a growing collection of new products sold by profit-seeking corporations and whose safety is not adequately regulated by the responsible government agencies. This kind of issue frame would likely elevate the salience of specific corporations activities as well as the potential responsibility of government regulators to protect the public. In this article, we explore the question of how news media frame innovation in the case of nanotechnology. We build on the techniques and findings of previous research by others exploring the tone of coverage and risk-benefit weighing, adding to this a focus on issue frames and their implications for responsibility and government involvement in the market. Below, we develop a fourfold set of issue frames for news coverage of nanotechnology, involving progress, regulation, conflict, and generic risks. Our definition of these frames is designed to comply with entmans (1993) definition of framing, especially how frames define problems, offer a causal interpretation or moral evaluation, or recommend a treatment or remedy. We examine U.S. news coverage from 1999 through 2008, to look for the frequency and dynamics of these frames over time and across news outlets. Our findings show that the framing of nanotechnology has become more diverse over time. We show that the multiplication of frames during times of heavier coverage is due chiefly to increased numbers of stories from more news outlets. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings.

Nanotechnology as a Public Issue

It is useful to situate a public issue such as the implications of technological innovation with respect to stages of news coverage and policy making. In this regard, nanotechnologys dominant characteristic is its early stage in agenda-building and policy-making processes. although the United States has had a formal set of research and development (R&D) policies toward nanotechnology since 2001, issues involving regulation, public health, or workplace and environmental safety are at their earliest stages of

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discussion by policy elites and relevant agencies. In Maynard-Moodys (1992, 1995) terms, nanotechnology policy has barely emerged as a topic of debate in administrative arenas such as the environmental Protection agency (ePa) and the Food and Drug administration (FDa), and it is even further from reaching the public arena of Congress. Since news media tend to focus on debate when it reaches the public arena, we should expect relatively little attention from the news media to nanotechnology compared with other issues that are under public debate. However, a discussion has taken place about whether nanotechnology might be vulnerable to a public backlash similar to that against genetically modified organisms in europe (anderson, Petersen, Wilkinson, & allan, 2009; Sandler & Kay, 2006). This concern has motivated interest in social science research about nanotechnology within the traditional R&D establishment. Opposition to nanotechnology has not yet extended beyond a few advocacy organizations. as a public issue, nanotechnology has elicited virtually no debate or disagreement among elected officials, although an increasing amount of attention is being given by governments to potential problems (Mantovani, Porcari, Meili, & Widmer, 2009). In general, news tends to be driven by drama and conflict narratives (Bennett, 2009; Paletz & entman, 1981), a tendency that extends to scientific issues (Nisbet, Brossard, & Kroepsch, 2003). This means that some of the characteristic drivers of news frames and narratives are absent in the case of nanotechnology. as of 2004-2005, when a spate of survey research was reported, public awareness of nano as an issue was low, as would be expected from its policy characteristics (Cobb & Macoubrie, 2004; gaskell, Ten eyck, Jackson, & Veltri, 2005; Scheufele & Lewenstein, 2005; Schtz & Wiedemann, 2008). gaskell et al. (2005) compare american and european attitudes, and while they find a good deal of public uncertainty about nanotechnologies, they find americans on the whole significantly more optimistic, as they are about other technologies. Scheufele and Lewenstein (2005) show in a multivariate model that the level of attention to mass media shapes the general disposition toward science, and this predicts the predisposition toward nano. This result is consistent with the general tendency of news media to tell science stories positively and in terms of progress (Nisbet et al., 2003). It has also been shown that knowledge interacts with affect in shaping attitudes toward nanotechnology (Lee, Scheufele, & Lewenstein, 2005) and that scientists may be more concerned about problems with nano from pollution and health risks than is the public at largea result that reverses the typical relationship, where scientists are more optimistic about new

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discoveries and the public more skeptical (Scheufele et al., 2007; also, see Besley, Kramer, & Priest, 2008; Wilkinson et al., 2007). Framing effects on attitudes have been shown experimentally with respect to nano. Cobb (2005) shows modest experimental effects from variants on two competing frames, one associated with progress and sciences capacity to produce technology that solves human problems and one conveying the humanistic view that technology cannot solve the problems of the human condition. That study shows that multiple frames do not produce opinion effects and that frames are more effective in influencing attitudes when they include specific risks. Schtz and Wiedeman (2008) also find that framing nanotechnology producers as either multinational corporations or small and medium-sized firms influences attitudes, but benefit portrayal does notthough this latter result runs against the general expectation from psychometric research.

News Framing of Nano

against this setting of individual-level response to nano, content analysis of news has shown several main features of how newspapers are telling the story of nano. Friedman and egolf (2005, 2007) find a trend toward more attention to nano in the news, but a good deal of year-to-year variation in coverage levels has also been shown (Weaver & Bimber, 2008), raising a question about the nature of long-term trends in stories relevant to the societal implications of nano. an important emphasis of analysis so far has been on the tone of coverage, especially whether either benefits or risks outweigh the other in the story (anderson et al., 2005; anderson et al., 2009; Friedman & egolf, 2005; Stephens, 2005). This focus on risk-benefit weighing is important because of the theoretical significance of how communication cues people to think in terms of losses or gains, and it has found that the stories tend to be positive in tone, especially in the United States. Research comparing american and British media coverage shows that the american coverage tends to be more positive, with a greater tendency to focus on benefits than risks (Friedman & egolf, 2005; gaskell et al., 2005). an implicit concern in this research is that the news media give an appropriate balance when writing about nano; however, many unobvious subtleties exist in how people respond to risk-benefit communication (Pidgeon, Kasperson, & Slovic, 2003). establishing an objective standard for balancing risks and benefits is problematic; a traditional informal standard is that the news media should reflect the distribution of expert

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assessments of risks and benefits (anderson et al., 2009). Research on expert opinion about nano has shown that experts are in some cases more concerned about risks than the public (Scheufele et al., 2007; also, see Besley et al., 2008). another concern on the part of researchers studying news coverage of nano is whether science journalism is successfully reaching beyond translation of science to identify tradeoffs, harms, and costs (Blum & Knudson, 1997). Beyond assessment of story tone, the literature on media coverage of nanotechnology has also conceptualized frames in terms of general topics associated with nano, such as business stories or societal implications stories (Friedman & egolf, 2005; Wilkinson et al., 2007). anderson et al. (2005), for example, combine risk, regulation, and impact on developing countries into a single general category of societal implications, differentiating these from nine other general news frames. Stephens (2005) finds that 27% of stories about nano in a mix of american and international papers describe scientific discoveries or projects, 17% focus on eLSIs, and 11% discuss nano as a business topic. Wilkinson et al. (2007) and anderson et al. (2005) report on a sample of British newspapers in 2003 and 2004, in which 22% describe scientific or medical discoveries, 9% describe eLSIs, and 15% provide business stories. anderson et al. (2009) give an excellent review of this literature and conclude that the patterns in nanotechnology coverage so far are generally consistent with science-reporting practices in general, except that the nature of risk associated with nanotechnology is unsettled, as are the narrative approaches. So the general picture from the literature is that the news coverage contains a mix of risks and benefits with a generally positive valence and that stories about scientific discovery, the business aspects of nano, and eLSIs are the most common. Our theoretical concerns pick up at this point. We are interested in the extent to which news framing primes citizens to think about the actors and interests involved in science and technology, especially the responsibility of government institutions. We are motivated by long-standing concerns in the social study of science and technology, with the comparative insulation of R&D processes from the level of democratic debate afforded other areas of public enterprise, as well as the generally low level of attention paid by the news media to the extent to which technology embodies political and social relations (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 1987; ellul, 1964). We combine these concerns with work in political communication on framing. That work shows that frames shape which values people associate with the object of news (Nelson et al., 1997) and that frames can

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strongly influence the extent to which citizens treat events as simply occurring autonomously around them as opposed to resulting from decisions or actions by specific actors, such as elected officials (Iyengar, 1991). an important implication of this work is that frames can shape how much citizens blame victims for their misfortune rather than assigning responsibility to government or others for patterns of problems or harms. In his classic formulation of issue framing, entman (1993) offers the following definition: To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation [italics added] (p. 53). We are interested in extending previous work particularly with respect to the latter part of entmans definition. Previous research has classified nano stories with respect to broad categories such as science fiction, scientific discovery, medical project, business, funding of nano, and so on (e.g., anderson et al., 2009) but has been ambiguous about how news stories define problems, give moral evaluations, or imply treatment recommendations. Specifically, research so far has failed to address clearly how news frames approach the relationship between the market, the state, and the public interest. The general business frame found by a number of researchers, for example, could reflect a narrative emphasis on economic opportunity, wealth, corporate strategy, and progress or could emphasize resistance by corporations to proposed health and safety regulations. We see the crucial component of news frames about new technologies as resting on how they prime the public to think about the interests of corporations in bringing products to the market or exposing workers to potential risks in the workplace, the responsibility of regulators to protect public safety, and the interests of the R&D establishment in this system.

Potential Issue Frames for Science and Technology

To develop a set of issue frames that address these aspects of news coverage adequately, we consulted several sources. We read widely in the english language press about nanotechnology to identify common themes and narrative approaches to the market, government, and organizations with an interest in regulation, and the R&D process. We then read a range of elite sources about nano that we suspected might have an influence on the news media. These included public documents of the NNI, the ePa, and the

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FDa, as well as the Web sites and reports of many NgOs, including Friends of the earth (FOe), greenpeace, and eTC group (eTC). From all these sources combined, we identified four major issue frames relevant to our theoretical interests. These frames appear to capture a great deal of the variance in how stories are told by both elites and journalists; they satisfy entmans (1993) definition of promoting a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation (p. 53); and they generally cut across the news frame categories employed by other researchers. Progress frame. The first frame we identified in our scan of the news media, government officials, and NgOs involves progress. This is a reasonable starting point, because as Nisbet et al. (2003) observe, news coverage of science often is framed around the idea that the trajectory of research and development through time is characterized by progress and that intellectual progress in science and technology leads to social progress. The key elements of the progress idea are that scientific discovery and the process of technological development are in an important sense natural, as opposed to politically or economically interested, and that the application of discoveries to the human condition is similarly straightforward. as a general principle, frames are rooted in culture, resting in shared symbols or shared mental associations between groups of ideas or values and ways of interpreting observations. Belief in progress arising from the linkage of technological change to improving social conditions is a common element of american culture, and it is reflected in the tradition of news coverage of science and technology. Progress has indeed been a central theme in statements from officials of the NNI, and we would expect to see this theme echoed in news coverage. One of the central messages of the NNI is the desire to use social research and policy to optimize technological progress by boosting beneficial research while anticipating and remedying any potential costs or side effects. The year after Clintons announcement, Roco and Bainbridge (2001) wrote for the NNI in the executive Summary of the first major U.S. government report on the societal implications of nano; they explicitly employed the term progress to characterize technologys major implications for health, wealth, and peace in the upcoming decades, describing the federal governments role as serving to accelerate that progress. They described the need for research on the societal implications of nanotechnology, which include educational, technological, medical, environmental,

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ethical, legal, etc. and added that such research will boost the chances for NNIs success and help the nation take advantage of new technology sooner, better, and with greater confidence (p. iii). In other words, a better understanding of the societal implications of technology serves to advance and optimize technological innovation, rather than serving as a foundation for regulation or reprioritizing of R&D policy. This report, along with a follow-up document in 2005, is generally considered by researchers to be a key document in the public discussion of nano (see Lewenstein, 2005; Stephens, 2005). In news coverage, the progress frame emphasizes the benefits to society that flow from a natural process of discovery and application and minimizes issues of responsibility, choice, priorities, and regulation. We associate this frame with the position of the U.S. R&D establishment, as well as with the norm in much popular news reporting on science and technology. Because nanotechnology has not yet fully reached the public arena, because no risk events or cases of direct harm have occurred, and because societal conflict about nano is very low, we expect journalists to commonly employ progress frames as a form of default approach to storytelling. Previous research suggests that perhaps a fifth of news stories about nano emphasize progress (anderson et al., 2005; Stephens, 2005; Wilkinson et al., 2007). Regulation frame. The second frame we found emphasizes regulation. Most new technologies reach a stage of diffusion into society where regulatory action by government takes place. This may occur early in a technological life cycle, as in the case of stem cell manipulation, or late, as in the case of the history of automobile safety and environmental protection. Nanotechnologies are at a very early stage of diffusion, but they include a wide range of applications with potential regulatory relevance, including in medical diagnostics and treatments, food packaging, cosmetics, and substances subject to environmental and workplace dispersion. Our reading shows that discourse about regulation by public officials and other elites became available in the mid-2000s. In 2005, the Presidents Council of advisors on Science and Technology (2005) reviewed the NNI and modestly broached the topic of regulation, stating that further efforts should be made to evaluate the potential toxicity of some nanotechnologies and that where harmful human or environmental effects are proven, appropriate regulatory mechanisms should be utilized by the pertinent Federal agencies (p. 3). The following year, a group of eight public interest groups petitioned the FDa to regulate nanoscale materials by treating them as novel substances subject to scrutiny for safety, instead of continuing to classify them

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as homogeneous with their micro- and macroscale equivalents. The same year, the ePa issued a notice that it would subject nanomaterials in washing machines to regulatory scrutiny where manufacturers make germ-killing claims about the effects of the nanomaterials. The FDa held a public meeting in 2006 on regulation of nano, and in 2007, it announced that it would not take regulatory action. an expanded network of groups followed up the 2006 action in 2008 with a more specific petition to the ePa demanding regulatory action on the use of nanosilver in pesticides. The public interest group eTC provides a classic statement of a regulatory perspective on nanotechnology. In Report a sometimes cited as influential on public discourse (Lewenstein, 2005; Schtz & Wiedemann, 2008), eTC (2003) states that nanotechnology poses horrendous social and environmental risks and that the producers have largely evaded regulatory scrutiny (p. 4). greenpeace is more explicit about the questions of responsibility that form the regulation frame for the more generic eLSI issue: The interests of those who own and control the new technologies largely determine how a new technology is used (arnall, 2003, p. 4). FOe (2007) states, Sunscreen manufacturers are increasingly using this unregulated technology (p. 3) and the result is novel health and environmental risks that cannot be predicted from conventional materials (p. 4). Previous research on newspaper coverage of nanotechnology has shown the significance of eLSI themes, though without specifically examining the attribution of responsibility for regulation. Our regulation frame captured stories emphasizing corporations that use nanotechnology in production processes or that bring products to market, consumers who may be harmed by the actions of these corporations, or government agencies with responsibility for acting to protect the public. This emphasis on the marketconsumer-regulation triad constituted our regulation frame. Conflict frame. The third frame that emerged in our scanning of news, government documents, and NgO statements is a variation on the regulation frame that we suspected would be sufficiently important to consider on its own. This frame involves nanotechnology as the new locus of conflict. Traditional news media tend to favor story subjects and frames involving drama, which frequently involves conflict among the actors (Bennett, 2009; Paletz & entman, 1981). We have no reason to doubt that this general predilection would apply in the case of stories about nanotechnology. In that case, we would expect that these stories might describe the struggles between traditional adversaries in the political system namely, corporations and environmental or consumer groups, such as

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those that petitioned the FDa and ePa for regulation. In 2003, eTC called for a global moratorium on nano research and a recall of all products, potentially setting the stage for conflict with businesses. also, a network of activists against nano materials conducted public protests in the europe and the United States in 2004 and 2005, targeting specific business groups, such as the retailer eddie Bauer, and several nano business alliances and conferences. Our conflict frame differs in emphasis from a regulation frame by drawing attention to disputes among specific societal interests or actors. Regulatory action is relevant to a story framed around conflict, but in a regulatory frame, we would expect to find emphasis on the adjudication of competing interests by government regulators. a regulatory frame might likewise discuss calls for or against regulation but would emphasize government as an actor and its responsibility for protecting the public at large from harm. The conflict frame focuses on the conflict itself and on competing claims or interests. Generic risk frame. The fourth and last frame focuses on generic risks. In this approach to telling the story of nanotechnologies, the journalist might provide background on nanotechnology, describing potential eLSI aspects and identifying potentially risky outcomes of innovation but would avoid framing technology as explicitly appropriate for regulatory consideration, as a locus of conflict or disagreement, or as inherently progressive. The generic risk frame includes a wait-and-see attitude about the good and bad aspects of new technologies and avoids attributing responsibility. Stories framed in this way also avoid the boosterism of the progress frame, which is either implicit or explicit about the fact that new technologies flow naturally from new discoveries and will on the whole improve society. We suspected that a great deal of the news coverage found by other researchers to present a mix of risks and benefits would in our scheme exhibit either this generic risk frame or the progress frame. These four frames represent a range of approaches to telling stories about nanotechnology. Identifying the presence and frequency of these frames in news coverage would help advance our understanding of the likely public response to nanoscale science and technology and would provide clues about the dynamics of frame building by the news media during the extended period in which nanotechnology remains low in public salience but also appears to be approaching closer to a place in debate within the administrative and public arenas.

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Hypotheses and Research Questions

Has any of these four frames emerged as dominant in newspaper coverage of nano? News frames are believed to be sticky; that is, once a new issue is framed in a dominant way by the news media, changes in framing are typically difficult (Nisbet et al., 2003). For this reason, the early stage of news coverage, in which the news media search for a frame for a new topic, is of particular interest. If one of the above frames has diffused widely in news coverage, it is likely to be influential in shaping public opinion and to remain dominant unless substantial new developments alter journalists approach. On the other hand, research shows that in general, exposure to multiple frames, as well as citizen discussion with others exposed to differing frames, tends to reduce the framing effects (Druckman, 2004; Druckman & Nelson, 2003). This would imply that if the framing of nano is contested, then news media influence on public opinion via framing mechanisms is likely to be weaker than in the case of a dominant frame. We expect that the news media will be especially attentive to the messages of public officials rather than the messages of interest groups or other actors in civil society, especially in the absence of conflict or differing perspectives among officials. Because of the prominence of messages from the nanotechnology establishment itself and the avoidance of deep engagement with nano by regulatory officials, we would anticipate that news framing would reflect an official frame from the federal R&D establishment, which is exemplified by the statements of the NNI and is dominated by progress. We expect that the progress frame would be more prevalent than the generic risk frame, its chief rival as a default approach to news. The fact that the news media have been shown to exhibit a predisposition toward describing science and technology in terms of progress strengthens this expectation, which forms our first hypothesis.
Hypothesis 1: News coverage of nanotechnology is dominated by the progress frame.

The history of nanotechnology as an emergent public issue over the past decade has featured a limited number of proto-regulatory events: specific warnings to the public about hazards, calls for regulatory action by interest groups, and reactions in some cases by regulatory agencies. We expect that such events would produce shifts in the framing of news from the dominant progress frame to regulatory and conflict frames. But we also expect that in the absence of sustained disagreement among public officials or conflict

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among societal actors to drive news, journalists will fall back on the progress frame as a default approach to telling stories about science and technology. This expectation constitutes our second hypothesis.
Hypothesis 2: News coverage of nanotechnology will exhibit temporary shifts toward regulation, risk, and conflict frames in response to political developments, followed by a return to the dominant progress frame.

The news media do not speak with one voice. although a classic expectation is that elite news outlets tend to move in concert with one another, changes in the structure of news media in the past decade indicate divergence among individual-outlet news agendas and a decline in gatekeeping capacity. On the topic of nanotechnology specifically, previous work by two of the authors of this article has shown that relatively little correspondence exists in coverage volume between the New York Times, other elite papers, and the local news (Weaver & Bimber, 2008). The same study found that wire stories, especially from the associated Press (aP), exerted the largest single influence on coverage of nano in both local outlets and big-city newspapers, except for the Times. as the structure of the newspaper business proceeds through the present crisis of restructuring and loss of revenue, it is prudent to attend to cross-outlet variation in framing. We see no basis for formulating specific expectations about the direction of variation in framing, so we pose a research question.
Research Question 1: are particular frames identifiable with particular news outlets?

Method
Our method involved collecting newspaper stories about nano using LexisNexis, coding them for the presence of the four frames, and then analyzing the frequency of frames to examine the hypotheses and research question.

Period Under Study

The NNI was announced by President Clinton in 2000. We defined our window for news collection from the year prior to his announcement and continuing to the present. Our sample therefore starts on January 1, 1999, and ends on September 31, 2008.

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News Outlets
We defined the population of news outlets of interest to be the largestcirculation newspapers in the United States. Using the September 30, 2006, figures from the audit Bureau of Circulation, we first chose the 10 largest papers: USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, New York Daily News, New York Post, and The Houston Chronicle. We used LexisNexis to conduct full-text searches of these, with two special cases. LexisNexis provides searches only of abstracts of the The Wall Street Journal rather than of the full text, so data on that paper are based on the abstracts. LexisNexis does not archive the Chicago Tribune, so we supplemented our search with searches within NewsBank for that paper. In addition to the 10 newspapers, we included the aP as a distinct source of news. Local news coverage of nanotechnology in the United States is dominated by aP stories, and as many as half of the stories in major, bigcity newspapers also originate from the aP. However, these stories as they appear in distribution are invisible to searches in LexisNexis because licensing policies do not permit LexisNexis to include wire stories as they appear in the news stream (Weaver & Bimber, 2008). For example, an aP story carried by Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, and USA Today will appear in LexisNexis only once, as an article sourced from the aP, and its presence in the three papers will be invisible. Friedman & egolf (2005) are sensitive to this problem, though it is not widely recognized and poses substantial validity problems for studies attempting to determine which news stories actually reach their audiences. The problem is especially acute for attempts to study local news about issues of national scope, since the bulk of such news originates from wires and other syndicated sources. We therefore focused our study on national news, and we included a separate search for aP-produced stories, though we could not know how widely these were circulated.

News Stories
a common practice in research on nanotechnology in the news has involved conducting broad searches on all news stories about nano, an approach typically implemented using searches on the variants of two terms: nanotechnology and nanoscience (gorss & Lewenstein, 2005; Stephens, 2005). anderson et al. (2005) use nano, nanotechnology, grey goo, and nanobot/nanorobot. Friedman & egolf (2005) use a refined

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approach, identifying stories about nano that also pass a Boolean test combining terms relating to the environment, health, risk, and related problems. This focuses the sample on news that describes the ethical, legal, or social aspects of nanotechnology. In constructing our news search, we extended their technique using two steps, the first designed to be inclusive using automated searching and the second to refine the results using human inspection of the stories. First, we searched for stories containing any permutation of nano (nano!)particularly nano, nanoscience, nanoscale, and nanotechnology and any one of the following: risk!, toxic!, priva!, surveillance, disast!, goo, self-replicating, swarm, sludge, ethic!, unethical, regulat!, rules, harm!, danger!, health, illness, sick, environment!, standards, law, legal, policy, govern, governance, safe!, hazard!, controvers!, damage, or concern!. also, using Boolean operators, we excluded stories that included nanosecond and apple Corporations Nano line of products. The result of this step was 1,763 stories. Our second step was human screening of these. Consistent with previous studies, these stories were overwhelmingly dominated by coverage of R&D breakthroughs, write-ups of business opportunities associated with nano, and science-oriented stories about interesting features of nano. We consider such stories to constitute internal coverage of science and technology, because of the tendency to focus exclusively on scientific and technological development or to offer positive speculation from scientists and engineers themselves about potential applications of their work, which are invariably positive. The unsurprising conclusion from this step is that journalists tend to tell positive stories about science and technology. Because so many of these stories do not address societal or human concerns at all, they form a weak indicator of how news media frame the intersection of technology and progress, regulation, and political conflict, when journalists are actually addressing such issues. Therefore, we stipulated that the bulk of news coverage of science and technology comprises stories about discoveries and inventions, without attention to eLSIs. We designed our analysis to examine what happens when the news media go beyond such stories and attempt to address broader implications, in order to form a more stringent test of our hypotheses. Therefore, our screening step filtered the data set for stories in which journalists attempt to address some potential concern, side effect, risk, or problem associated with technological innovation. To do this, we hand coded the full-text results2 of this search to flag stories including at least one potential social, ethical, health, environmental, or regulatory concern. Stories passing this filter numbered 137. We assessed the reliability of the

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coding for this screening step using two coders and a reliability sample of 157 stories drawn from a larger set of raw searches using our Boolean operators in the LexisNexis database. Cohens kappa is 0.71.

Coding for the Frames and Reliability

We developed coding criteria for the four frames, examining the lead frame in each of the 137 stories. We defined the lead frame as that contained in the title and lead paragraph together. There are several reasons for our decision to focus on the lead frame. The first is that we view the lead frame as intrinsically important. For readers scanning many stories lightly, the lead frame may be the only frame they encounter. For those reading a story more closely, the lead frame signals to them what the article is about and how to interpret subsequent text. We also noted that lead frames in newspaper stories have been shown to be reliable as proxies for coding fulltext content for high levels of aggregation and small numbers of content categories (althaus, edy, & Phalen, 2001). For our purposes, each frame was a dichotomous variable, for four variables. Our reliability procedure for this step was as follows. First, we piloted our coding scheme using two coders and a set of 25 stories drawn from news outlets not included in the study samplethat is, outlets not among the 10 largest newspapers. The coders scored each frame separately as present or absent, producing four variables for reliability testing. Reliabilities of the pilot round were mixed, so the coders repeated pilot rounds of 50 new stories for several iterations, with training between the iterations. a total of about 10 hours of training was required. For the final reliability set, we used all the stories from the top 10 newspapers (N = 82) for the period 2000 through 2007 as a reliability sample, and both coders coded all stories. The values of Cohens kappa were as follows: progress frame, 0.83; regulation frame, 0.89; conflict frame, 0.78; and generic risk frame, 0.78. Data from one coder for the entire data set were then used for the analysis.

Results
To provide a context for analyzing the frequency of the four frames, it is first useful to examine the overall volume of news coverage. We do this by quarter-year, from 1999 through the third quarter of 2008. across the whole period, the average number of stories per quarter from the top 10 papers is

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Figure 1 Volume of news on nano, 1999-2008

Note: Cumulative story count, by quarter, for the 10 largest-circulation U.S. papers and the associated Press.

2.3less than 1 per month. In addition, the aP produced an average of about 1 story per quarter. Because LexisNexis does not include stories carried in the top papers that originated from wire services including aP, we have separately produced an estimate of the size of this problem (Weaver & Bimber, 2008). In a study of the period from 2006 to 2007, the most active period, we found that a little over half of the stories about nano running in major papers were produced by aP. Using this figure, we estimate that the actual volume of news in the top papers was perhaps 4 to 5 stories per quarter, which is tantamount to assuming that each aP story was carried on average by 2 of the top 10 papers. These figures confirm that nanotechnology was not high on the news agenda. There is a good deal of variation around these means, as Figure 1 shows. News coverage rose from none in the first quarter of 1999 to a modest peak in 2000, in response to the announcement of the NNI. after modest attention to the NNI, the story count fell through 2002 to the point where none

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of the major papers or aP produced a story meeting our criteria for 9 months. Journalists attention returned to nano in 2003, when the story count started oscillating in an upward trend to peaks of 5 to 7 stories per quarter in the top 10 papers in late 2006 and early 2007. Contrary to the general expectation that nano is rising on the news agenda, we do not find an upward trend in news produced by the top 10 papers over the past 5 years. For the period from the third quarter of 2003 to the third quarter of 2008, the story count actually trends downward somewhat but is chiefly characterized by oscillation. a simple linear fit to story count over time shows essentially no trend (R2 = .02). Our first hypothesis predicts that the dominant frame is progress. To analyze frame counts, we treat aP as a single source and combine it with coverage from the top 10 papers, for a total of 11 sources. Over the entire period for the 11 sources, the frequencies of the four frames are as follows: progress, 40%; generic risk, 37%; regulation, 18%; and conflict, 5%. The difference between progress and generic risk is not significant at the .05 level, while the other differences are significant pairwise in t tests and across all four frames in an analysis of variance. This remains true when aP stories are removed. We therefore reject Hypothesis 1 for the whole period. The progress and generic risk frames occur at similar frequencies, while the regulation and conflict are more uncommon. The data would support a modification of Hypothesis 1 that would state that together, the generic risk and progress frames are dominant. When we plot the frequency of frames over time, two trends stand out that bear closer examination, as depicted in Figure 2. The first is that the initiation of the NNI in 2000 was covered by the news media entirely using the progress and generic risk frames. In the 3-year period 1999 through 2001, we find 14 progress-framed stories and 7 generic riskframed stories, which is supportive of Hypothesis 1 for this period alone. after the rise in coverage in 2003, journalists again favored the progress and generic risk frames, but in mid-2004, they began increasingly framing stories around regulation. Though regulation-framed stories dropped off in 2007 and 2008, progress-framed stories did as well. The composition of frames in the news stream can be visualized differently by examining the fraction of each years news framed in each of the four ways. Figure 3 presents the data this way, showing the increasing diversity of frame types over time. Hypothesis 2 predicts that the progress frame will serve as a default approach to storytelling, to which journalists will return following temporary shifts in frames to cover regulatory or

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Figure 2 Frequency of the four news frames, 1999-2008

Note: Cumulative story count, by year, for the 10 largest-circulation U.S. papers and the associated Press combined.

conflict-based issues. The data do not support this expectation, suggesting instead that journalists approach to framing is diversifying over time. There are at least two possible explanations for the increasing diversity of frames over time. The first is that events such as the petition to the FDa and the ePas announcement about regulating nanosilver elicit stories framed around the objects of coverage: regulatory agencies and issues. Once journalists start covering stories this way, they may be less likely in the future to return to the default progress frame. That is, the increase in frame diversity reflects a broadening of journalists viewpoints about nano. The second explanation is that the rise in the number of stories about nano in the mid2000s simply reflects the view and frames of a larger number of news outlets. We explore these two possibilities by examining whether a correlation exists between the number of stories and the diversity of frames. To do this, we use the Herfindahl index (H), which measures concentration (or its inverse, diversity). H varies from a high of 1, which indicates complete

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Figure 3 Composition of news by frame, 1999-2008

Note: Proportion of all stories exhibiting each of the four frames, by year, in the 10 largestcirculation U.S. papers and the associated Press combined.

concentration in a single actor or unit among N total actors (e.g., only one frame appears), to a low of 1/N, which means that each actor or unit shares an equal fraction of the total (e.g., each of the four frames appears 25% of the time). We compute a value of H for each year, and then for each news outlet. For the yearly analysis, H varies from 1 in 2001 and 2002 to a low of 0.34 in 2006, when progress, regulation, and generic risk appeared in nearly equal number. The Pearson correlation between H and number of stories per year is .65 (p = .04). a good deal of the frame diversity in the mid-2000s is correlated with more stories being published. When we calculate H across publications, by aggregating each outlets stories over the whole time period, we can see whether a relationship exists between the number of stories each publication produces and the number of frames it employs. Here we find a correlation of .34 that does not reach significance (p = .41). This suggests that it is mainly cross-publication variation that

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Table 1 Frames by Publication

Publication associated Press Chicago Tribune The Denver Post The Houston Chronicle New York Times USA Today The Wall Street Journal The Washington Post Story Count 33 5 2 14 33 5 6 27 Regulation (%) 27 40 0 21 3 20 0 26 Conflict (%) 0 20 0 0 9 0 17 4 Progress (%) 45 40 50 36 52 40 67 15 generic Risk (%) 27 0 50 43 36 40 17 56 Ha 0.36 0.36 0.50 0.36 0.41 0.36 0.50 0.40

Note: The following ran no stories: Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, and New York Post. a. Herfindahl index.

produces diversity in frames. Papers that prefer one or two of the frames have a general tendency to stick with these whether they publish few or many stories. So when an event takes place and more outlets cover a story, each brings a portfolio of frame preferences to the mix, with the result that the more the outlets that cover nano, the greater the number of frames that are available to the public. Variation at the level of individual news outlets is the subject of Research Question 1, which inquires whether particular news outlets favor particular frames. We tabulated the appearance of each frame in coverage by the newspapers, as shown in Table 1. Some of the values are consistent with the general intuition about the orientation of the papers. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, carried no stories with a regulation frame and had the largest fraction of progress frames in the sample. This is consistent with the reputation of the Journal for conservative editorship with an emphasis on free-market activities. The Washington Post, on the other hand, employed the regulation frame the most and the progress frame the least, which is also consistent with its focus on national politics and, especially, Washington institutions. The New York Times, the outlet with the most stories, was second to the Journal in the fraction of stories employing the progress frame. Yet for the most part, the news outlets each employed a mix of frames. The values of H across the outlets range from

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0.36 to 0.5, indicating that individual outlets employ different frames for different stories, and as Table 1 shows, this effect is only weakly a result of the number of stories each paper produces. Our conclusion about Research Question 1 is that while some outlets exhibit frame preferences, such as The Wall Street Journal and the progress frame, the bigger picture is that journalists employ a mix of frames across all news outlets, and this mix grew substantially between 2003 and 2008. The primary set of developments that led to the shift in news coverage toward regulation took place in 2005 and 2006. We examined these in some detail to better understand how coverage by specific outlets reflected unfolding developments in administrative arenas. Coverage framed around regulation began on December 5, 2005, with an article in the The Washington Post saying, Momentum is building in Congress, environmental circles and in the industry itself to beef up federal oversight of nanomaterials (Weiss, 2005). The story cited pressure from public groups for regulators to act decisively about nano, including discussion at a House Science Committee hearing, an expert report from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars about the extent of nanomaterials in the marketplace, and criticism of an ePa voluntary stewardship program by which corporations could choose to adopt basic safety standards. Three days later, the aP ran a very similar story, citing discussions at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the Wilson Center report and work by other academics, and claims by environmental advocacy groups (Smith, 2005). The following month, another report by the Wilson Center saying federal regulations were inadequate to protect the public elicited stories with regulation frames by the aP, the Post, and the Chicago Tribune. In april 2006, the petition to the FDa for regulation of nano by a group of environmental and consumer groups elicited regulation-framed stories by the aP, the Post, and The Houston Chronicle, while the New York Times put out a generic risk story. Late in 2006, the ePa issued its announcement about regulating germ-killing claims, and shortly thereafter, the city of Berkeley issued a local ordinance requiring firms producing or handling nanoparticles to disclose the fact. aP produced several regulation stories about ePa and Berkeley, the Post produced two, and USA Today and The Houston Chronicle each produced one. In early 2007, the New York Times produced its first and only story with a regulation frame. The brief surge in stories about regulation therefore reflected the interaction of several streams of events with reporting by key news outlets,

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especially the aP and The Washington Post. The first stream comprises expert reports about nanotechnology and society published in 2005 by the NNI, the U.K. Royal Society and Royal academy of engineering, and, perhaps most prominently in the United States, the Woodrow Wilson Centers Project on emerging Nanotechnologies. The second stream of events was advocacy by public groups such as greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council, and eTC, which had been active for several years in calling for public policy change and even conducting protests. The third stream was attention to the issue by administrative agenciesFDa, ePa, and NIOSH and to a lesser extent the House Science Committee and the city of Berkeley. The confluence of these developments in these three streamsreports by experts, advocacy by public groups, and attention from policymakersin late 2005 and 2006 elicited regulation-framed stories from some news outlets, while others stuck predominantly with stories framed around progress or generic risk.

Discussion
Previous research has shown a predilection on the part of news media to tell stories about science and technology in positive terms and to emphasize a general theme of progress while reflecting a wide variety of topical approaches to nano, from science fiction to business opportunities. Our work shows that when one cuts across such categories to inquire about how the news media treat questions of responsibility and the role of the state with respect to the market, the answer is quite interesting. The progress frame, which deemphasizes the role of corporations and government in favor of an emphasis on the natural unfolding of science, has diminished in frequency over time in stories about the societal implications of nanotechnologies. It dominated early coverage, almost certainly as a reflection of the boosterism of the NNI. The mid-2000s saw a rise in stories framed around regulation, and to a lesser extent conflict, and contrary to both our own expectations and the general trend in the literature, the news media did not simply return to reliance on progress as the chief frame for nano following the decrease in activities involving regulators after the mid-2000s. By the end of our study period in 2008, with the overall volume of news trending downward, the most common frame was generic risk, followed by regulation, then progress, and finally conflict. This is a substantial change from a

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decade ago, when progress frames dominated coverage and exemplified the perspective of the NNI at that point. We view this as a positive reflection on journalism. Clearly the best science journalism goes beyond the translation of science for the public by providing context and the basis for citizens to connect their own values and political judgments to tradeoffs involved in science and technology. We believe this means also going beyond merely placing technology in a general business or social context. It entails identifying the interests of the players involved in innovation, as well as the responsibilities of elected officials who are accountable for representing conflicting interests and for protecting public safety. In news framed around progress, the research enterprise is essentially self-correcting, as it chiefly produces societal benefits and can also, with sufficient care and expenditure, anticipate the problems or risks it itself creates and can correct these. Traditional progress-framed stories and reports of discovery not only typically fail to prime people to think about responsibility, they may also actively imply to readers that science developments just happen. as Iyengar (1991) has shown, when people view the developments around them in an event-centric way rather than in a thematic context, they are less inclined to think in terms of responsibility and accountability. We find it encouraging that the increase in attention to nanotechnology by the news media in the mid2000s has led to a diversification of frames and that the consequence so far has not been a return to progress-framed journalism. In the case we have examined here, credit goes significantly to the aP and The Washington Post. Our study was designed to examine only stories in which the news media attend in some way to ethical, legal, or social concerns with nanotechnology, which means that we excluded the vast majority of news coverage that simply reports on developments in science and technology. We would expect those stories to be framed nearly universally around progress, and this tempers our conclusions about the practice of framing by science journalists. Our findings show that when news media do attend to ethical, legal, or social concerns associated with nanoscience and technology, they are choosing among the regulation, generic risk, and progress frames, with the conflict frame a distant fourth. We therefore hope that a larger fraction of stories about science and technology would address these issues, and would do so with frames other than progress. It is too soon to draw conclusions about how nanotechnology will fare in the news media in the long term. It is clear that the diversity of the

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discussion about nano has increased since the early days when the NNI was launched, and one can read the trends so far as a story of advocacy groups such as greenpeace and eTC broadening a public conversation initially dominated by official voices, through advocacy efforts and engagement with public officials, as well as experts such as those at the Woodrow Wilson Center who also broadened the national discussion. at the same time, the low place of nanotechnology on the news agenda means that many possible future paths exist, from a continued status quo to a dramatic rise in conflict and concern with regulation.

Acknowledgments
The authors thank Barbara Herr Harthorn, John Mohr, Meredith Conroy, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: National Science Foundation grant SeS 0531184.

Notes
1. Following the practice of other researchers, we use the shorthand term nanotechnology (or nano) to refer to nanoscale science and technologies generally. 2. except for The Wall Street Journal, for which we relied on the abstract.

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David A. Weaver, Ma (University of North Carolina), is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studies political communication. Erica Lively, MS (University of California, Santa Barbara), is a PhD candidate in the Department of electrical and Computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studies optical communications technology. Bruce Bimber, PhD (MIT), is a professor in the Departments of Political Science and (by affiliation) Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studies digital media and politics.

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