In 1981, Allan Mazur formulated his famous hypothesis: there is a direct relation between media coverage and public reaction against technological issues. Mazur’s hypothesis is exclusively and simply quantitative: the more the media cover a technoscientific issue, the more the public is brought to take a position against them. Few contributions that have tested Mazur’s hypothesis, directly or indirectly, have found a rather weak relationship between media exposure and public opinion. In this paper, I conducted an analysis on media coverage of food in Italy in the period 2010-2016. I calculated a risk index in the corpus of newspaper articles. This measure is used to compare it with longitudinal public opinion surveys to test this presumed “direct effect” of media.
Il rischio alimentare in prima pagina
RUBIN A
2017
Abstract
In 1981, Allan Mazur formulated his famous hypothesis: there is a direct relation between media coverage and public reaction against technological issues. Mazur’s hypothesis is exclusively and simply quantitative: the more the media cover a technoscientific issue, the more the public is brought to take a position against them. Few contributions that have tested Mazur’s hypothesis, directly or indirectly, have found a rather weak relationship between media exposure and public opinion. In this paper, I conducted an analysis on media coverage of food in Italy in the period 2010-2016. I calculated a risk index in the corpus of newspaper articles. This measure is used to compare it with longitudinal public opinion surveys to test this presumed “direct effect” of media.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
