Search
Matthew C. Nisbet
Associate Professor of Communication, Northeastern University
Matthew C. Nisbet, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Public Policy, and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. Nisbet studies the role of communication and advocacy in policymaking and public affairs, focusing on debates over over climate change, energy, and sustainability. Among awards and recognition, Nisbet has been a Visiting Shorenstein Fellow on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, a Health Policy Investigator at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a Google Science Communication Fellow. In 2011, the editors at the journal Nature recommended Nisbet's research as “essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate change debate,” and the New Republic highlighted his work as a “fascinating dissection of the shortcomings of climate activism."
Read Less
In a new campaign advertisement (above), Senator John McCain focuses on global warming, framing his position as a pragmatic “middle way” approach between the two extremes of denying there is […]
Gallup has released a survey showing that at this point in the race, Obama’s association with Wright may be potentially more damaging to his candidacy than McCain’s continued embrace of […]
Since Earth Day, a number of pollshave been released confirming that public opinion on climate change has changed very little over the past two years or since the premiere of […]
Obama as young Luke Skywalker, Hillary as Darth Vader, Bill as the Emperor, Bill Richardson as Han Solo. This new viral video promoting Obama’s candidacy is brilliant and effective humor. […]
Pew has released an in depth analysis of news coverage of the Pope’s U.S. visit. As I have posted previously, some media critics have claimed that the press gave the […]
Can a radio talk show host motivate Republicans to turn out in a Democratic primary and vote strategically for a candidate? Past research suggests that political talk radio can have […]
Bill McKibben’s latest grassroots project is the launch of www.350.org, a Web portal and blog designed to focus world attention on cutting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to […]
Evidence for the influence of an effective media strategy, from a just released Pew survey: Following his first visit to the United States as spiritual leader of the world’s Catholics, […]
This week’s On the MediaspotlightsRushmore Drive, the new search engine marketed to African Americans (audio above). As the program describes, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to find those […]
Do voters under the age of 30 always trend more liberal and more likely to vote Democrat? Contrary to conventional wisdom, history and data say “No.”Political preferences are a product […]
A round up of recent news coverage where I have provided analysis…1. USA Today ran this profile of actor Ed Begley, focusing on his commitment to environmental issues and a […]
As I wrote yesterday, one of the emotional strategies employed in Expelled is to paint atheist pundits as the stand-ins for “big science,” in the process selectively avoiding interviews with […]
Dallas Morning News runs this profile of Premise Media CEO A. Logan Craft. The feature spotlights the results of theater exit data collected by Premise and sheds additional light on […]
Two weeks ago, as Expelled premiered in more than a 1,000 theaters across the country, I went with several friends and graduate students for an early Friday evening screening at […]
At the NYTimes and the WSJ, Just 2% of Front Page Stories Focus on Either Science or the Environment
In an analysis released last week, Pew reports that during a three month period (Dec. 13-March 13, 2008), only 2% of front page stories at the New York Times and […]
In the wake of Clinton’s victory in Pennsylvania, the NY Times editorialized that Hillary’s campaign team had taken “the low road to victory.” According to the Times, one particular ad […]
The Pope is technically a head of state, so when he visits the US, why doesn’t the news media spend more time asking him hard hitting questions about church policy […]
Following the AAAS meetings in February, I had this to say about the future of science and environmental journalism: The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting […]
Earlier this week, I argued that a fundamental shift was needed in climate change communication strategy and that the shift meant refocusing news coverage on urban areas rather than arctic […]
The Center for Inquiry’s Susan Jacoby, author of the NYTimes bestseller The Age of American Unreason, appeared last night on The Colbert Report. As Colbert remarked, he prefers emotion over […]