Scheduling science on television: A comparative analysis of the representations of science in 11 European countries

While science-in-the-media is a useful vehicle for understanding the media, few scholars have used it that way: instead, they look at science-in-the-media as a way of understanding science-in-the-media and often end up attributing characteristics to science-in-the-media that are simply characteristics of the media, rather than of the science they see there. This point of view was argued by Jane Gregory and Steve Miller in 1998 in Science in Public. Science, they concluded, is not a special case in the mass media, understanding science-in-the-media is mostly about understanding the media (Gregory and Miller, 1998: 105). More than a decade later, research that looks for patterns or even determinants of science-in-the-media, be it in press or electronic media, is still very rare. There is interest in explaining the media’s selection of science content from a media perspective. Instead, the search for, and analysis of, several kinds of distortions in media representations of science have been leading topics of science-in-the-media research since its beginning in the USA at the end of the 1960s and remain influential today (see Lewenstein, 1994; Weigold, 2001; Kohring, 2005 for summaries). Only a relatively small amount of research has been conducted seeking to identify factors relevant to understanding how science is treated by the mass media in general and by television in particular. The current study addresses the lack of research in this area. Our research seeks to explore which constraints national media systems place on the volume and structure of science programming in television. In simpler terms, the main question this study is trying to address is why science-in-TV in Europe appears as it does. We seek to link research focussing on the detailed analysis of science representations on television (Silverstone, 1984; Collins, 1987; Hornig, 1990; Leon, 2008), and media research focussing on the historical genesis and current political regulation of national media systems (see for instance Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Napoli, 2004; Open Society Institute, 2005, 2008). The former studies provide deeper insights into the selection and reconstruction of scientific subject matters, which reflect and – at the same time – reinforce popular images of science. But their studies do not give much attention to production constraints or other relevant factors which could provide an insight into why media treat science as they do. The latter scholars inter alia shed light on distinct media policies in Europe which significantly influence national channel patterns. However, they do not refer to clearly defined content categories but to fairly rough distinctions such as information versus entertainment or fictional versus factual. Accordingly, we know more about historical roots and current practices of media regulation across Europe than we do about the effects of these different regimes on the provision of specific content in European societies

Agglomeration of Knowledge in the German Regional Economy

This article investigates the geographical location of workers in jobs with high-knowledge requirements in the German economy. Our analysis takes individual-level data from the German socioeconomic panel (GSOEP) and combines them with the knowledge information for different jobs that comes from the US Department of Labor. We make use of the regional information inherent to the GSOEP that can be accessed only through a special user contract. High-knowledge employment is differently distributed across the German regions. Whereas highknowledge employment in communication and media as well as public safety is rather concentrated across regions, high-knowledge employment in computers and electronics, engineering and technology, education and training and mechanical tasks is more dispersed. Eastern German regions display a lower share of highknowledge workers in computers, engineering, mechanical tasks and public safety. The results are important to understand the regional development potential across the German regions. Our analysis detects a division in high-knowledge employment between the East and West of Germany

Triggering change : how investigative journalists in Sub-Saharan Africa contribute to solving problems in society

This article analyses 12 cases of investigative journalism in Sub-Saharan Africa. The reporters all claimed to have contributed to change processes by influencing government policy, action by state administration, supporting the uptake of scientific solutions or provoking public debate. An assessment of these processes shows that in 10 cases, the journalists indeed helped to trigger change and in two cases they failed to do so. The cases are evaluated through an explorative approach inspired by the dynamic models for communication on public issues developed by Rucht and Peters. Different types of investigative stories in Sub-Saharan Africa are identified and hypotheses are developed on key factors that were important in investigating and publishing the stories as well as in achieving change. A decisive element of investigative journalism in Sub-Saharan Africa seems to be the involvement of and the interaction with other societal non-journalist actors

Long-term Implications of Local Industrial Clusters

Local industrial clusters have attracted much attention in recent economic and geographic literature. The focus has been on identifying the conditions for the emergence of such clusters. Here the long-term implications of local industrial clusters are studied. To this end, we examine German regions where those that contain long-existing industrial clusters are compared to all other regions. We statistically examine what characterises regions that have contained local industrial clusters for quite some time. The analysis is conducted separately for three industries

Beyond the SUTVA: How Industrial Policy Evaluations Change When We Allow for Interactions Among Firms

Developed countries have used several place-based policies to address the socioeconomic underdevelopment of their lagging regions ranging from tax exemptions to soft loans. Among these place-based policies, investment subsidies to private firms are one of the most popular in the EU. However, the empirical evidence to date is mixed and there is no general consensus on the effectiveness of such policy. Most evaluation studies have focused on the policy impact on subsidized firms, whereas the possible spillovers on other firms have been mostly overlooked. This is due to the dependence of these analyses on the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA), i.e. they assume away any possible interaction among firms. There are several situations in which this assumption is not plausible; however, there are severe empirical difficulties in disentangling the spillover effects from more relevant confounding factors. In this paper we propose evaluation strategies capable of detecting potential positive and negative spillovers. In presence of spillovers, the use of eligible but unsubsidized firms as control group will yield biased ATT estimates. We propose to build a counterfactual scenario drawing firms from the pool of firms located in non-assisted areas as similar as possible to the eligible areas. In addition to the ATT, our approach allows to estimate spillover parameters that contrast the positive agglomeration effect with the negative cross-sectional substitution and the crowding-out effect. Econometrically we adopt a Matching difference-in-differences (DID) using the recent coarsened exact matching (CEM) that dominates commonly used existing matching methods in its ability to reduce imbalance, model dependence, and bias. Our application concerns the Italian Law 488 (L488) and contrasting positive and negative spillover effects we find positive spillovers in terms of investments and negative spillovers in terms of employment, but these estimates are not statistically significant. This demonstrates that the positive effects of the subsidies on the subsidized firms? growth in terms of investments and turnover are not engendered to the detriment of the unsubsidized firms. The main methodological contribution to the literature is our novel evaluation strategy that can be adopted in other contexts to evaluate the micro spillovers of other policy instruments