Guest Thinkers

On last week’s announcement that CNN is shifting the focus and form of its science coverage, I am going to be posting what is a very different interpretation than the […]

This summer I will be heading to Denmark to speak at a June 11 conference of the Danish Science Journalists’ Association. A major focus of this year’s conference will be […]

About a 100 attendees turned out for Thursday night’s talk at the New York Academy of Sciences. The event marked the end of a year long series on science communication […]

Over at George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication, they are hosting a poll asking readers to vote for the 2008 Climate Change Communicator of the Year. Among the choices […]

The University of Wisconsin news office has posted a valuable Q&A with my friend and UW professor Dietram Scheufele. The occasion is a new study he has published with colleagues […]

Think Progress, the blog for the Center for American Progress, has a detailed run down on the Obama administration’s announced appointment of Steve Chu as Energy secretary, Carol Browner as […]

Next year, as the science community celebrates the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, leading organizations such as the AAAS, NIH, and the National […]

In a Policy Forum article published this week at Science, MIT Professor of Management John Sterman reports on an experiment that shows just how self-defeating it is to continue to […]

Obama took over the airwaves Wednesday night, hitting most of the important audience groups. According to Nielsen (above), Obama’s 30 minute 8pm infomercial which aired on CBS, FOX, NBC, Univision, […]

Polls including cell-phones are highlighted in orange.Wondering about the variation across survey organizations in estimating Obama’s national lead? As I have been discussing in my research methods course here at […]

Opinion-leaders are a commonly overlooked resource by science organizations and advocates. Public communication initiatives too often ignore the special individuals across communities and social groups that can serve as vital […]

With polls looking good for an Obama victory, here’s a clip from an interview I did with Big Think back in July, discussing why Obama has been such a successful […]

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: The 2008 presidential election has broken so many political barriers that historians may overlook one unusual fact: When Barack Obama takes the oath of […]

Photo credit.Readers in DC, New York City, and several other locations may be interested in turning out for talks I will be giving over the coming months. Details on dates, […]

What else is new in the Obama presidency? Presidents have given weekly radio addresses for decades, but Obama plans to take this vehicle for direct communication digital, offering motivated viewers […]

This past year, in the School of Communication here at American University, we were lucky to add to our faculty Lauren Feldman, a newly minted PhD from the Annenberg School […]

For members of the science policy community, I will be giving a talk tonight at 6pm at AAAS headquarters, titled “Science Communication Reconsidered: Key Issues for 2009 and Beyond.” (1200 […]

I taped an interview yesterday with PRI/BBC The World discussing the unfortunate use by science advocates of the term “denier” in debates over climate change, evolution, and other issues involving […]

My heads up on a forthcoming segment at Public Radio International’s The World has generated a discussion about the communication misfires that science advocates create when they use terms such […]

PRI The World ran a 10 minute feature today on the wisdom of using the term “denier” in the debate over climate change and other science policy controversies. Correspondent Jason […]

Just how bad has the information tide turned against McCain on the economy? The conservative Economist magazine, in survey results published this week, finds that economists overwhelmingly name Obama as […]

With $3.5 million earned in its weekend box office debut, Bill Maher’s Borat-inspired mockumentary about religion managed to just edge the opening weekend for Ben Stein’s Expelled. Religulous, which opened […]

Remember the Democratic New Hampshire primary? According to news organizations and many pollsters, the NH primary was supposed to be the loss that put Hillary Clinton out of contention and […]

If Bill Maher’s strategy for landing interviews for his mockumentary Religulous sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same method that Ben Stein & co. used for Expelled. From an LA […]

Nielsen has released an interesting breakdown and comparison of the audiences for the first presidential debate and the VP debate.According to Nielsen, sixty-one percent of all U.S. households watched at […]

From the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org, (listen to the ad and read the full analysis): An Obama-Biden radio ad hammers McCain for being opposed to stem cell research. Not true. […]

How difficult has it been for economists to communicate their expertise to policy makers during this financial crisis? The Chronicle of Higher Education has this report: During the days after […]

Film education? Consulting scientists on Jurassic Park helped morph the image of dinosaurs in the public’s mind from reptilian to avian, popularized the idea of “Chaos Theory,” and made plausible […]

The chatter among pundits and journalists this post-debate morning has focused in part on John McCain’s body language and split-screen demeanor. There was a clear aggressiveness and emotion to McCain’s […]

In a two hour special, PBS Frontline tackles what the award winning series calls the most important issue of our time. (Promo above.) The special program airs Tuesday night in […]