Das "Kommentariat" : Rolle und Status einer Öffentlichkeitselite

Im Mittelpunkt des WZB-Papers stehen die „Meinungsmacher“ der überregionalen Qualitätszeitungen in der Bundesrepublik. Die Kommentare dieser „Leitmedien“ wer-den im politischen System intensiv wahrgenommen. Die Themenpräferenzen und Mei-nungen der Kommentatoren dienen als Hinweise auf allgemeine Stimmungen in der Bevölkerung und auf die Durchsetzbarkeit konkreter Entscheidungen. Auch in öffent-lichkeitstheoretischer Perspektive stellen Kommentatoren einen besonders herausgeho-benen „Sprecher“-Typus dar. Im Gegensatz zu anderen Sprechern, die um Medienauf-merksamkeit konkurrieren, besitzen Kommentatoren ein entscheidendes Privileg: sie produzieren nicht nur Themen und Meinungen; sie können selber dafür sorgen, dass ihre Äußerungen tatsächlich öffentlich werden. Angesichts der öffentlichkeitstheoreti-schen und politischen Bedeutung der Kommentatoren überrascht, dass das „Kommenta-riat“ in der bisherigen Forschung eine merkwürdig unbeschriebene Größe geblieben ist. Auf der Basis einer schriftlichen Befragung und persönlicher Gespräche mit Kommen-tatoren der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, der Süddeutschen Zeitung, der Frankfurter Rundschau, der Welt und der tageszeitung gibt diese Studie einen Einblick in die wich-tigsten Charakteristika dieser Sprechergruppe. Wer sind also die Meinungsmacher der deutschen Qualitätspresse? Wie viele Journalisten umfasst diese Öffentlichkeitselite und welche sozio-kulturellen Profile kennzeichnen sie? Wie sehen die Zugangschancen aus? Handelt es sich um einen vergleichsweise offenen Kreis von Journalisten, die von Zeit zu Zeit kommentieren, oder um eine abgeschlossene Gruppe von Vordenkern der Nati-on, die dauerhaft und fast ausschließlich mit der Meinungsproduktion betraut ist? Was sind die Kriterien für den Zugang zu dieser Öffentlichkeitselite und wie unterscheiden sich die Zeitungen in Hinblick auf die Zugangschancen? Und führt die Auswahl der Kommentatoren zu Themenspezialisierungen oder Meinungsoligopolen innerhalb und möglicherweise auch zwischen den Zeitungen?The WZB-paper focuses on the “opinion makers” of the national quality newspapers in Germany. The press commentaries are closely observed by the political system. The issues and opinions brought up in the opinion section serve as indicators for the general sentiment of the public and the popularity of certain policies. From a theoretical point of view, commentators are regarded as a very special type of actor in the public sphere. In contrast to other actors in public communication who have to compete for media atten-tion, they enjoy a significant privilege: Not only do they produce messages for public debate, they also decide which messages are eventually publicized. Considering their public and political influence it is rather surprising that neither sociology nor communi-cation research has investigated this group of communicators. This paper presents re-sults of a survey and in-depths-interviews with commentators of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Welt and tageszeitung and thus provides an insight into the characteristics of this group. Who are the “opinion makers” in the leading national quality newspapers? How many journalists belong to this elite of actors in the public sphere and what are their socio-cultural profiles? To what degree and how is access to the opinion section restricted? Do commentators form a closed circle of national masterminds permanently producing opinions or do they rep-resent a rather open group of journalists who among other articles also write commen-taries from time to time? What are the recruitment criteria for commentators and in which ways do the national broadsheets under study differ in terms of access gain? And finally: Does the selection of commentators lead to issue specialization or even opinion monopolies within and across the newspapers

Systematic Review of Explicit Instruments Measuring Nature Connectedness: What Do We Know and What is Next?

This systematic review assesses the methodological quality of manuscripts focusing on scales that explicitly measure nature connectedness. A literature search in six electronic databases was conducted using a search strategy based on PICO guidelines. Only peer-reviewed primary research available in English language, published between 2000 and 2021, meeting the scope of this review were included. Data from 35 studies were narratively analyzed. Their methodological quality was assessed using the COSMIN Risk of Bias checklist. Only five studies were rated as high/adequate quality. Based on the findings we make the following recommendations: (a) the need for the development of a more universal nature connectedness construct, (b) the requirement to increase the methodological quality of the scales, (c) the need to identify which the scales measure trait or state, (d) the need to increase the validate scales cross-culturally, and (e) the need to develop scales that can be employed with non-adult samples

The Progression of the Stargardt Disease Type 4 (ProgStar-4) Study: Design and Baseline Characteristics (ProgStar-4 Report No. 1)

BACKGROUND/AIMS: To describe the design and baseline characteristics of patients enrolled in the multicenter, prospective natural history study of Stargardt disease type 4. METHODS: Fifteen eligible patients aged 6 years and older at baseline, harboring disease-causing variants in the PROM1 gene, and with specified ocular lesions were enrolled. They were examined at baseline using a standard protocol, with 6 monthly follow-up visits for a 2-year period including best-corrected ETDRS visual acuity, spectral-domain optical coherence tomography, fundus autofluorescence (FAF), mesopic and scotopic microperimetry (MP). Areas of definitely decreased FAF (DDAF) and questionably decreased FAF were outlined and quantified on FAF images. RESULTS: Amongst the 15 patients (29 eyes) that were enrolled at 5 centers in the USA and Europe, 10 eyes (34.5%) had areas of DDAF with an average lesion area of 3.2 ± 3.5 mm2 (range 0.36-10.39 mm2) at baseline. The mean retinal sensitivity of the posterior pole derived from mesopic MP was 8.8 ± 5.8 dB. CONCLUSIONS: Data on disease progression in PROM1-related retinopathy from this study will contribute to the characterization of the natural history of disease and the exploration of the utility of several modalities to track progression and therefore to potentially be used in future interventional clinical trials

Scotopic Microperimetric Assessment of Rod Function in Stargardt Disease (SMART) Study: Design and Baseline Characteristics (Report No. 1)

PURPOSE: To describe the study design and characteristics at first visit of participants in the longitudinal Scotopic Microperimetric Assessment of Rod Function in Stargardt Disease (SMART) study. METHODS: Scotopic microperimetry (sMP) was performed in one designated study eye in a subset of participants with molecularly proven ABCA4-associated Stargardt disease (STGD1) enrolled in a multicenter natural history study (ProgStar). Study visits were every 6 months over a period ranging from 6 to 24 months, and also included fundus autofluorescence (FAF). RESULTS: SMART enrolled 118 participants (118 eyes). At the first visit of SMART, the mean sensitivity in mesopic microperimetry was 11.48 (±5.05; range 0.00-19.88) dB and in sMP 11.25 (±5.26; 0-19.25) dB. For FAF, all eyes had a lesion of decreased autofluorescence (mean lesion size 3.62 [±3.48; 0.10-21.46] mm2), and a total of 76 eyes (65.5%) had a lesion of definitely decreased autofluorescence with a mean lesion size of 3.46 (±3.60; 0.21-21.46) mm2. CONCLUSIONS: Rod function is impaired in STGD1 and can be assessed by sMP. Testing rod function may serve as a potential outcome measure for future clinical treatment trials. This is evaluated in the SMART study

Analysis of MicroRNA Expression in Embryonic Developmental Toxicity Induced by MC-RR

As cynobacterial blooms frequently occur in fresh waters throughout the world, microcystins (MCs) have caused serious damage to both wildlife and human health. MCs are known to have developmental toxicity, however, the possible molecular mechanism is largely unknown. This is the first toxicological study to integrate post-transcriptomic, proteomic and bioinformatics analysis to explore molecular mechanisms for developmental toxicity of MCs in zebrafish. After being microinjected directly into embryos, MC-RR dose-dependently decreased survival rates and increased malformation rates of embryos, causing various embryo abnormalities including loss of vascular integrity and hemorrhage. Expressions of 31 microRNAs (miRNAs) and 78 proteins were significantly affected at 72 hours post-fertilisation (hpf). Expressions of miR-430 and miR-125 families were also significantly changed. The altered expressions of miR-31 and miR-126 were likely responsible for the loss of vascular integrity. MC-RR significantly reduced the expressions of a number of proteins involved in energy metabolism, cell division, protein synthesis, cytoskeleton maintenance, response to stress and DNA replication. Bioinformatics analysis shows that several aberrantly expressed miRNAs and proteins (involved in various molecular pathways) were predicted to be potential MC-responsive miRNA-target pairs, and that their aberrant expressions should be the possible molecular mechanisms for the various developmental defects caused by MC-RR

Minimal Absent Words in Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Genomes

Minimal absent words have been computed in genomes of organisms from all domains of life. Here, we explore different sets of minimal absent words in the genomes of 22 organisms (one archaeota, thirteen bacteria and eight eukaryotes). We investigate if the mutational biases that may explain the deficit of the shortest absent words in vertebrates are also pervasive in other absent words, namely in minimal absent words, as well as to other organisms. We find that the compositional biases observed for the shortest absent words in vertebrates are not uniform throughout different sets of minimal absent words. We further investigate the hypothesis of the inheritance of minimal absent words through common ancestry from the similarity in dinucleotide relative abundances of different sets of minimal absent words, and find that this inheritance may be exclusive to vertebrates

Systematic Review of Explicit Instruments Measuring Nature Connectedness: What Do We Know and What is Next?

This systematic review assesses the methodological quality of manuscripts focusing on scales that explicitly measure nature connectedness. A literature search in six electronic databases was conducted using a search strategy based on PICO guidelines. Only peer-reviewed primary research available in English language, published between 2000 and 2021, meeting the scope of this review were included. Data from 35 studies were narratively analyzed. Their methodological quality was assessed using the COSMIN Risk of Bias checklist. Only five studies were rated as high/adequate quality. Based on the findings we make the following recommendations: (a) the need for the development of a more universal nature connectedness construct, (b) the requirement to increase the methodological quality of the scales, (c) the need to identify which the scales measure trait or state, (d) the need to increase the validate scales cross-culturally, and (e) the need to develop scales that can be employed with non-adult samples

Shifts in Species Composition Constrain Restoration of Overgrazed Grassland Using Nitrogen Fertilization in Inner Mongolian Steppe, China

Long-term livestock over-grazing causes nitrogen outputs to exceed inputs in Inner Mongolia, suggesting that low levels of nitrogen fertilization could help restore grasslands degraded by overgrazing. However, the effectiveness of such an approach depends on the response of production and species composition to the interactive drivers of nitrogen and water availability. We conducted a five-year experiment manipulating precipitation (NP: natural precipitation and SWP: simulated wet year precipitation) and nitrogen (0, 25 and 50 kg N ha-1 yr-1) addition in Inner Mongolia. We hypothesized that nitrogen fertilization would increase forage production when water availability was relatively high. However, the extent to which nitrogen would co-limit production under average or below average rainfall in these grasslands was unknown

Identifying Neighborhoods of Coordinated Gene Expression and Metabolite Profiles

In this paper we investigate how metabolic network structure affects any coordination between transcript and metabolite profiles. To achieve this goal we conduct two complementary analyses focused on the metabolic response to stress. First, we investigate the general size of any relationship between metabolic network gene expression and metabolite profiles. We find that strongly correlated transcript-metabolite profiles are sustained over surprisingly long network distances away from any target metabolite. Secondly, we employ a novel pathway mining method to investigate the structure of this transcript-metabolite relationship. The objective of this method is to identify a minimum set of metabolites which are the target of significantly correlated gene expression pathways. The results reveal that in general, a global regulation signature targeting a small number of metabolites is responsible for a large scale metabolic response. However, our method also reveals pathway specific effects that can degrade this global regulation signature and complicates the observed coordination between transcript-metabolite profiles