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 ====== RQDA Workshop ======
-=== Research Objective: Understanding representation and role of media in climate change debate ===
+====STEP 1: Downloading RQDA====
-=== Sub-objective: Determine the factors that influence media representation of climate change ===
+=== Instructions for Mac, Linux and Windows, GO TO INSTALLATION ON RQDA WEBSITE ===    {{:rqda_installation.pptx|CLICK HERE}}
-== Raw data files: You will need these for the exercises.It is important to familiarize yourself with the texts prior to the workshop. The following blocks of text were taken from web sources for exercise purposes. Please read them prior to the workshop. ==
+====STEP 2: Workshop materials: Make sure raw text data files are accessible for workshop====
-. Government report 1
+=== Mock research objective: Understanding the representation and role of media in the climate change debate ===
-The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – comprised of top climate scientists from around the globe – has reached consensus that human activities have contributed significantly to global climate change. However, over time, the United States has refused to join concerted international efforts – such as the Kyoto Protocol – to curb human activities contributing to climate change. US newspaper and television media constitute key influences among a set of complex dynamics shaping information dissemination in this politicized environment. Mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages. Consistent adherence to interacting journalistic norms has contributed to impediments in the coverage of anthropogenic climate change science. Through analysis of US newspaper and television coverage of human contributions to climate change from 1988 through 2004, it has been found that adherence to first-order journalistic norms – personalization, dramatization, and novelty – significantly influence the employment of second-order norms – authority-order and balance – and that this has led to informationally deficient mass-media coverage of this crucial issue. By critically scrutinizing US print and television media as a ‘public arena,’ we improve understanding of how journalistic activities have shaped interactions at the interface with climate science, policy and the public.
+=== Sub-objective: to Determine the factors that influence the representation of climate change in the media===
+== Raw data files: You will need these for the exercises during the workshop.It is important to familiarize yourself with the texts prior to the workshop. The following blocks of text were taken from web sources for exercise purposes. Please read them. ==
-.  Government report 2
+. {{:gov_doc_1.txt|Government report 1}}
-Focusing on the representation of climate change in the British “quality press,” this article argues that the discursive (re)construction of scientific claims in the media is strongly entangled with ideological standpoints. Understood here as a set of ideas and values that legitimate a program of action vis-à-vis a given social and political order, ideology works as a powerful selection device in deciding what is scientific news, i.e. what the relevant “facts” are, and who are the authorized “agents of definition” of science matters. The representation of scientific knowledge has important implications for evaluating political programs and assessing the responsibility of both governments and the public in addressing climate change.
-. Interview 1
+.  {{:gov_doc_2.txt|Government report 2}}
-Male, 60 years of age, professional planner
-What do you believe is the role of media in climate change debates?
-The media are very important players in cli¬mate change com¬mu¬nic¬a¬tion – most people do not read sci¬entific reports, spe¬cialist web¬sites and blogs, or the reports of the IPCC. Although in theory, the ‘facts’ of cli¬mate change sci¬ence should be reported in a straight¬for¬ward way by news¬pa¬pers and tele¬vi¬sion net¬works, con¬sid¬er¬able dif¬fer¬ences exist between the edit¬orial lines taken by dif¬ferent media organ¬isa¬tions about the reality and ser¬i¬ous¬ness of cli¬mate change.
-Perhaps unsur¬pris¬ingly, there is a strong rela¬tion¬ship between the polit¬ical per¬spective of a media organ¬isa¬tion and its pos¬i¬tion on cli¬mate change. The web¬site of the left-leaning UKnews¬paper the Guardian, for example, is known inter¬na¬tion¬ally as a hub of cli¬mate change and envir¬on¬mental reporting and opinion – and scep¬tical opin¬ions are rarely to be found. In com¬par¬ison, right leaning media (such as the US Wall Street Journal) are far more likely to carry scep¬tical opinion and edit¬or¬ials. Although it is dif¬fi¬cult to estab¬lish cause and effect, it seems highly likely that the pos¬i¬tion of right and left-leaning media is one of the key influ¬ences on public per¬cep¬tions (which dis¬play a sim¬ilar split along ideo¬lo¬gical lines), and media-generated con¬tro¬versy is also often cited as a reason for scep¬ti¬cism about cli¬mate change. But inter¬est¬ingly, media ‘exag¬ger¬a¬tion’ of cli¬mate change is also one of the meas¬ures that has been used to indicate scep¬ti¬cism in public atti¬tudes – so there is a com¬plex rela¬tion¬ship between public per¬cep¬tions and media reporting of cli¬mate change.
-Several ana¬lyses of media cov¬erage of cli¬mate change have con¬cluded that a dis¬course of uncer¬tainty is unsuited to the typ¬ic¬ally adversarial style of English lan¬guage journ¬alism (Boykoff, 2007; Ward, 2008). Radio, tele¬vi¬sion and news¬paper reports have been cri¬ti¬cised for inter¬preting too simplist¬ic¬ally the notion of providing a ‘bal¬anced’ set of views which can lead to com¬peting points of view on a sci¬entific issue being presented as equally sup¬ported, when in fact they are not (the concept of ‘balance-as-bias’).
-. Interview 2
+. {{:interview_1.txt|Interview 1}}
-Female, 25 years old, masters student
-What do you believe is the role of media in climate change debates?
-Media coverage of climate change has had noticeably significant effects on public opinion on climate change, as it mediates the scientific opinion on climate change that the global instrumental temperature record shows increase in recent decades and that the trend is caused mainly by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. Almost all scientific bodies of national or international standing agree with this view, although a few organisations hold non-committal positions.
-The way the media report on climate change in the English-speaking media, especially in the United States, has been widely studied, while studies of reporting in other countries have been fewer. A number of studies have shown that particularly in the United States and in the UK tabloid press, the media significantly understated the strength of scientific consensus on climate change established in IPCC Assessment Reports in 1995 and in 2001.
-A peak in media coverage occurred in early 2007, driven by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. A subsequent peak in late 2009, which was 50% higher, may have been driven by a combination of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit email controversy and December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
+. {{:interview_2.txt|Interview 2}}
-Some researchers and journalists believe that media coverage of political issues is adequate and fair, while a few feel that it is biased. However, most studies on media coverage of the topic are neither recent nor concerned with coverage of environmental issues. Moreover, they are only rarely concerned specifically with the question of bias.
-. Newspaper 1
-After several years of taking a beating from the poor economy, new pollution rules and a flood of cheap natural gas, the coal industry was on the rebound this year as mining projects moved forward in the western U.S. and demand for the fuel began to rise, especially in Asia.
-But almost overnight, coal is back on the defensive, scrambling to stave off a dark future amid President Barack Obama’s renewed push to rein in climate change.
-The proposal, with its emphasis on cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants, would put facilities like the 2,100 megawatt Colstrip electricity plant in eastern Montana in regulators’ cross-hairs. That has profound spin-off implications for the massive strip mines that dot the surrounding arid landscape of the Powder River Basin and provide the bulk of the nation’s coal.
+. {{:newspaper_1.txt|Newspaper 1}}
-Montana’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives bluntly declared that the administration had decided to “pick winners and losers” in the energy sector with its plan. “He wants to move toward shutting down the coal industry,” Republican Rep. Steve Daines said of the President.
-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency rejected claims that the administration’s plan would exclude coal. They pointed to billions of dollars being spent by the government on technologies to decrease emissions by capturing and storing carbon dioxide from coal plants.
-Yet widespread application of those technologies is years away, and Mr. Obama made clear in announcing his proposal that he intends to halt the “limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants. He directed the Environmental Protection Agency to craft rules to make that happen.
-The Colstrip plant, which dominates the skyline of a coal-centred town by the same name, burns about 9 million tonnes of coal a year from a nearby mine and provides power to customers as far away as Seattle.
-According to the EPA, the plant churned out more than 13 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2011, the latest year for which data was available. That’s roughly equivalent to the emissions from about 3 million cars running for a year.
-On Tuesday, as Colstrip’s towering smokestacks poured out a constant plume of steam and smoke into otherwise blue skies, pipefitter Joe Ashworth, 60, was nearby packing up his RV. He spent the past two months working on a maintenance project at the plant. The travelling union worker said people in the coal industry were nervous that efforts to curb emissions could cost jobs and drive up electricity prices.
-“Go green, sure. But do you have an electrical vehicle that will pull my trailer so I can make a living?” he asked.
-Despite a frequently heard boast that the state has more coal than anywhere else in the U.S., antipathy toward the administration’s plan is not universal in Montana. One of Mr. Daines’ predecessors, former representative Pat Williams, said last week that warming temperatures pointed to a “doomsday” scenario if carbon emissions were not addressed.
-Others maintain that the worries over lost jobs are overstated. On Tuesday, the Natural Resources Defence Council plans to release a report detailing new jobs that would be created because of all the work needed to retrofit plants such as Colstrip. The environmental group said its analysis of the administration’s plan shows 3,600 jobs in Montana alone.
-Among utilities elsewhere in the country, the trend away from coal has been well under way over the past several years. Rock-bottom natural gas prices – coupled with huge price-tags to clean up mercury and other pollutants from burning coal – drove many utilities to simply switch fuels.
-Those pressures finally started to ease this year: Demand from utilities started to rise as coal stockpiles dwindled. Proposals for major new mines by Cloud Peak Energy and Arch Coal Inc. gained traction. And coal finally started to reclaim its competitive edge as gas prices rose.
-Colstrip is among those plants that have remained open, in part due to heavy capital investments. That includes $88-million (U.S.) spent on air pollution controls since 2000, according to PPL Montana, which co-owns the 360-employee plant and operates it on behalf of five other utilities.
-Carbon dioxide controls would cost far more: $430-million to install the equipment, plus annual operating and maintenance costs of $900-million, according to a PPL study from several years ago.
-That would equate to $53 for every ton of coal burned, the company said. That’s about five times the price of the fuel itself in the nearby Powder River Basin, according to pricing information from the Energy Information Administration.
-Still, PPL representatives and others in the industry see room for manoeuvring before carbon capture becomes mandated. Key details of the administration’s plan still must be worked out, including the scope of emissions cuts and their timetable. The broad goal is to achieve a 17-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2020.
-Assuming the goal doesn’t shift, the key question will be how those reductions are spread among different sectors of the economy, from transportation and power production, to manufacturing.
-Even without the President’s latest announcement, the Supreme Court ruled five years that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that the government must regulate, said Quinlan Shea, vice-president of the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities in the U.S. and has worked with the administration on the climate issue.
-“A lot of our friends in other industries and states and on (Capitol) Hill miss the fact that this isn’t optional,” Mr. Shea said. “At the end of the day, we will be protecting as much coal as we can.”