The representation of GM issues by traditional mass media

It is unsurprising that ‘GM Nation?’, the public debated sponsored by British Government in 2003, escalated the severity of GM matters and made 'GM Nation?' itself ‘the subject of some controversy, especially over questions of its representativeness’ (Reynolds and Szerszynski, June 2006). In the following one year after ‘GM Nation?’, media coverage, especially newspaper coverage, of either ‘GM Nation?’ or GM issues intensified negative public opinion on not only GM problems, but also the government’s ability to govern GM technology. GM commerce was described in the news as an ambitious and mercenary industry that exerted ‘considerable political pressure on the government and Britain more generally’

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(Augoustinos et al., 2010: 110). Correspondingly, research interests grew towards monitoring and analysing the media representation of GM technology to get a grasp of this emerging controversial technology positioned within a complicated social environment in relation to public attitude. Cook et al. (2006)’s work serves as a typical example.

Concentrating on British press coverage of the GM food debate and public reactions following ‘GM Nation?’,Cook et al.’s research (2006) gave particular attention to the intensified statements of journalists and elusive public opinion trends in the first half of 2003, when the controversy over GM increased dramatically. Unlike the majority of researchers, to gauge public attitude toward GM issues Cook et al. creatively combined applied linguistics with sociological discourse analysis to analyse GM-related news reports published by four mainstream newspapers in Britain: the Daily Mail, the Times, the Guardian and the Sun, given the views held by different newspapers the GM issue was framed within distinct contexts. Subsequent researchers (i.e. Shineha et al., 2008; Du and Rachul, 2012; Pollock et al., 2017) expanded this discourse analysis approach to investigate public reaction to GM technology, including the views held by stakeholders of the GM industry and feedback provided by the lay public from all walks of life. This enabled researchers to draw conclusions about how the GM debate presented by the press media ‘is communicated to the public and assessed by them’ (Cook et al., 2006: 6).

After analysing the recurring linguistic patterns of news reports, researchers saw a full range of framing skills employed in the coverage of GM controversy. For example, pro- GM news stories tended to ‘focus on the scientific fact of GM safety’ utilising scientific narratives (Cook et al., 2006:11), and attributed GM controversy to a lack of public understanding (ibid.). Anti-GM news stories preferred to invoke a broader context which encompassed society, politics and economics, and talked about the long-term

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and potential risks of GM (ibid.). Numerous rhetorical skills, such as emotional epithets (2006: 13) and metaphors (2006:14), were adopted in news stories so that attitudes and standpoints were reaffirmed and emphasised. In addition, a special connection between GM issues and ‘other political events of the time’ such as ‘the war in Iraq’ (2006: 5) was observed by researchers studying news reports as a rhetoric strategy: ‘a rich source of metaphor, allusion and comparison for commentators’ (Cook et al., 2006: 6; Augoustinos et al., 2010: 109).

While people’s reactions to GM-related coverage varied, there was a clear divergence between stakeholders and the ordinary participants. Stakeholders had a clear consciousness of how the GM debate was going, while “ordinary” participants did not (Cook et al., 2006: 25). The broader understanding of GM debate was ambiguous in ordinary participants’ minds, while the identity of an author or the source of news stories was found to be the dominating framing device affecting the formation of a person’s views toward GM technology (Cook et al., 2006: 28).

Highly inspired by Cook et al.’s research, in 2010, Augoustinos and colleagues examined how the GM controversy was represented in British newsprint media ‘as a battleground of competing interests’ (2010: 98). This perspective further developed Cook et al.’s research outcomes acquired in 2003, and extended the work by ‘measuring stakeholders’ reactions’ (Cook et al., 2006) to explore how major stakeholders—‘the British public, the British government, the science of GM, and the biotechnology companies’ (Augoustinos et al., 2010: 98)—were constructed by the media coverage of the GM controversy. Critical discourse analysis was adopted by Augoustinos et al. to investigate ‘the linguistic patterns which function to construct specific versions or accounts of this highly contested issue’ (2010: 99). Augoustinos et al.’s findings concluded that the negative construction of the GM issue overwhelmed the positive one in quantity from 12th January 2004 to 11th April 2004 (Augoustinos et al., 2010: 100).

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Positive representations ‘were nonetheless in evidence’ (2010: 103), for instance one familiar argument is that GM technology is in favour of ‘the alleviation of hunger in the Third World’ (ibid.). Regarding the role of major stakeholders, first, Augoustinos et al. found that the public and the government were positioned in an ‘oppositional struggle over GM’ (2010: 106). Second, scientific communities were frequently challenged and questioned by the public because they were believed to have concurrent interests with governments (2010: 109).

In addition to the above findings, the association between GM issues and other political events, discovered by Cook et al. in previous research (2006), was again dug up by Augoustinos et al.’s research. The link has been applied to other scientific controversies by comparison, such as the BSE scare and climate change (Augoustinos et al., 2010: 109), illustrating the powerful function of analogy as a rhetorical device in issue framing. After analysing the ways in which major stakeholders were presented in newspaper coverage, Augoustinos et al.’s study outlined the social construction of GM debate. The study provides a rich resource for the evaluation or the anticipation of developing trends in public engagement and deliberation processes that are proposed in the ‘battleground’ of GM policymaking (Augoustinos et al., 2010: 112).

The media representation and social construction of GM technology presented by traditional media, could be seen as a lens through which to observe acts of science communication undertaken in the pre-digital-age. This lens provides a valuable reference for more recent researches. For instance, Augoustins et al.’s investigation (2010) on the construction of the major stakeholders of GM technology is an effective pathway to deeply analyse how highly contested an issue is within a complicated social environment, and also to forecast developing controversial trends in the near future. Gauging the reactions of experts and the non-experts respectively (Cook et al., 2006) has inspired me to measure the interactions between major stakeholders on the Internet

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where direct communication has become possible. The oppositional struggle over GM issues (Augoustins et al, 2010) undertaken by the government and the public hints that contradictory views might be the result of numerous aspects and the struggle over GM issues is likely to deteriorate the relationship between government and the public, unless appropriate measures are taken.