Mass Media and Biotechnology: Knowledge Gaps Within and Between European Countries

Abstract

Over the past  years, many studies have documented the existence of knowledge gaps in a variety of public affairs and science topics and have tried to get a better understanding of how third factors mediate the development of knowledge gaps on the micro level. But there still is almost no comparative research on the macro level. The aim of this study is to analyze education and media based knowledge gaps in the field of biotechnology across  European countries and across time. Our data is based on two representative and comparative Eurobarometer surveys carried out in  and . The results reveal that education and media input are important factors operating not only on the individual level, but also on the country level. Media effects research was dominated for a long time by a focus on purposeful short-term persuasion of opinions, attitudes, and behavior. The key question was: How can modern mass media be best used to influence political or social behavior in general or acceptance of new technologies like biotechnology in particular. This media-centric perspective dominated until the early s when long-term cognitive phenomena such as agenda setting, knowledge acquisition, or the cultivation of perceptions and images of the social world became a new focus of media effects research (McCombs, , p. ). One especially important argument for this paradigm shift was that prior to the process of influencing specific attitudes and behavior—‘How do people think about something?’—the objects of attitudes have to be generated, that is the topics or issues have to be ‘planted’ inside people’s heads, on the one hand by personal experience or on the other by mass media information as mediated experience: ‘What do people think about?’ The public learns about the importance of topics from the emphasis placed upon them by the news media. So the most important effect of mass media may lie in their ability to structure and organize the world for their audiences, based on the journalists gatekeeping routines for selecting, emphasizing, and framing the news. And only on the basis of these cognitive structures will people develop related opinions and attitudes. In