Search
Matthew C. Nisbet
Associate Professor of Communication, Northeastern University
Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Public Policy, and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. Nisbet studies the role of communication and advocacy in policymaking and public affairs, focusing on debates over over climate change, energy, and sustainability. Among awards and recognition, Nisbet has been a Visiting Shorenstein Fellow on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, a Health Policy Investigator at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a Google Science Communication Fellow. In 2011, the editors at the journal Nature recommended Nisbet's research as “essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate change debate,” and the New Republic highlighted his work as a “fascinating dissection of the shortcomings of climate activism."
Read Less
NPR’s On the Media runs this week an excellent feature questioning why stock market downturns end up being the top story everywhere in the media. Media preoccupation with Wall Street, […]
Over at The Intersection, my friend and colleague Chris Mooney has more thoughts on why the IPCC report failed to impact the wider media and public agenda. Mooney is in […]
Back in January, when a coalition of Big Industry CEOs and environmental groups got together to urge Congress and the President to pass “cap and trade” legislation on global warming […]
With their short term focus on the state primaries, GOP candidates are jockeying for favor from the right wing of the Republican party, and somewhere Democratic strategists are probably smiling.It […]
In a column last year, I detailed the historical trajectory in the U.S. of frames on nuclear energy, with images moving from very positive interpretations centered on social progress and […]
The Golden Rule in politics is never promise something you can’t deliver. In 1997 Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol and committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 […]
War metaphors have long been employed in science, ranging from the “War on Cancer” to the “War on Science” itself. These frame devices help draw attention to an issue, and […]
As I’ve chronicled at this blog, the IPCC report was a massive failure as a communication moment. The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the wider public […]
Last week marked the ten year anniversary of the announcement of the cloned sheep Dolly. While the U.S. press largely passed on the moment, the Canadian and British media paid […]
One of the great paradoxes of contemporary society is that Americans by way of the Internet and specialized cable TV channels have greater access to scientific information than at any […]
The major news organizations, especially the big three cable news networks, need a crash courses in ethics. Given all the major issues taking place in the world, how can they […]
Where have you heard this one before? Back in September, Canada’s Environment Minister John Baird echoed the predictions of a university economist when he claimed that if Canada were to […]
In the week following the Friday, Feb. 2 release of the Fourth IPCC report on global climate change, few if any Americans reported that global warming was the issue they […]
At the beginning of the spring semester, I noted that the Political Communication Seminar at the University of Virginia and the English 12 course at UNC-Chapel Hill were making use […]
Irony can be an effective persuasion tool. As pictured on the Drudge Report this morning with the headline: HEARING ON ‘WARMING OF PLANET’ CANCELED BECAUSE OF ICE STORM. The headline […]
Where once it was the province of against-the-establishment rebels and citizen media types, major institutions are now taking wide advantage of blogging technology to promote their message or to expand […]
Just how tough is it to sustain news and thereby public attention to the problem of global warming? Exhibit A: The week after the release of the IPCC report, the […]
Though they may appear very simple, intensive time and effort goes into plotting the jacket covers for intended blockbuster novels like Michael Crichton’s Next. Today’s backpage essay at the NY […]
A series of concerts “bigger than Live Aid” are being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before a global audience of two billion, […]
Declaring that framing should be a central strategy, Ellen Goodman in today’s syndicated Boston Globe column issues a call to arms on climate change: “Can we change from debating global […]