Debating Glyphosate: A Macro Perspective on the Role of Strategic Communication in Forming and Monitoring A Global Issue Arena Using Inductive Topic Modelling

Abstract

Stakeholders debate issues of public interest in global online issue arenas, but political decision makers decide on these macro issues at national and supranational levels. A better understanding of the role of organizations in forming and monitoring such issue debates is necessary, given the influence of public affairs activities and media debates on politicians' and public opinion. However, such a macro perspective is largely missing. This study analyzes the debate around the use of the pesticide glyphosate when the European Union decided on a license renewal in 2017. To uncover emerging salient topics and their relations with organizations, the online global coverage of the issue from the GDELT database (N = 1677) was analyzed using inductive automated content analysis (LDA topic modeling). Only three topics were salient in the arena, most prominently the carcinogenicity of glyphosate, thereby sidelining other relevant aspects. Furthermore, online issue arenas reach globally and are converged communicative spaces where a variety of media participate. Thus, the article develops and tests a typology of online news media for issue arena research. Advancing theory on organizations' roles and strategies in these online issue arenas, a new classification of actors based on their visibility and communication strategy is proposed. Societally relevant issues, such as the use of pesticides in agriculture and its consequences for public health, are discussed in global (online) issue arenas (Vos et al., 2014), but decided politically at national and supranational levels. Given the influence of the media's issue framing on public and politicians' opinions (Van Aelst & Waalgrave, 2016), a better understanding of issue debates in global issue arenas is necessary, particularly when they focus on macro issues that bear consequences for all of society (Ewing, 1990). However, a truly global perspective is largely missing in strategic communication research, as its focus has most often been on national issues of public interest (e.g., Luoma-aho et al., 2013) or cross-national analyses (e.g., Ihlen et al., 2018). Societal-level, i.e., macro, analyses of an organization's environment are of importance to strategic communicators in practice, and thus performed by applied research companies, but often lack in strategic communication research, where the organization rather than its environment is at the center of analysis (Zerfass et al., 2018). A variety of organizations be they companies, governments, or other interest groups form and monitor societal debates through strategic communication management. Issue arenas open offline and/ or online when various actors communicate about a societally relevant subject (Luoma-aho & Vos, 2009). Organizations actively form these arenas by communicating directly via owned media to get their issue position heard, by using shared media to engage in dialogue, and by approaching (earned) media outlets to build their agenda to reach political decision makers indirectly and via their constituents (Mc...

Overcoming the “blame game” in strategic climate communication: from decoupling accusations toward an arena-spanning agenda

“…We consider our findings to be a valuable conceptual contribution to the current strategic climate communication research. It complements current efforts in strategic communication scholarship to approach the climate crisis as an arena-spanning communication challenge, most prominently by scholars applying the rhetorical arena and issue arena approach (Frandsen and Johansen, 2011;Lock, 2020). Concretely, we introduce Kurt Imhof's (2011) explicitly macro-focused public arena approach.…”

The Importance of Fostering and Funding Scientific Research, and its Relevance to Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry

“…This is in contrast with determinations by the USEPA (USEPA, 2016), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA, 2015), and the WHO's Joint Meetings on Pesticide Residues (WHO, 2016), among others, which concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose carcinogenic risks to humans. These discrepancies sparked heated debates among stakeholders and in the media (Lock, 2020; Villnow et al, 2019), and contributed to controversial regulatory decisions in several countries, most notably within the European Union (Székács & Darvas, 2018; Tarazona et al, 2017). Within the European Union, the case is further complicated by the fact that active ingredients (i.e., glyphosate) are regulated at European Union level whereas the formulated products (e.g., Roundup® pesticide) are regulated at member state level (Székács & Darvas, 2018).…”

Le glyphosate et les journalistes en France

“…» (Neveu, 2015 : p 8). C'est en particulier la perspective retenue en France pour étudier les risques sanitaires tels que l'amiante (Henry, 2003), la maladie de la « vache folle » (Nollet, 2010), le sida (Marchetti, 2010) ou encore la potentielle dangerosité des pesticides comme le Roundup de Monsanto ainsi que de son principe actif, le glyphosate, à l'échelle européenne (Villnow, Rombach, and Bitsch, 2019 ;Bazzan and Migliorati, 2020 ;Lock, 2020 ;Tosune and Varone, 2020). Toutefois, à quelques exceptions près, telle que celle du Lasso, autre herbicide de cette firme phytosanitaire ( Jouzel et Prete, 2016), ces travaux n'ont pas directement mis en avant le rôle des journalistes, comme le font pourtant d'autres chercheuses et chercheurs qui travaillent sur d'autres problèmes publics comme l'immigration (Paes, 2018), le terrorisme (Marthoz, 2017), la pauvreté (Demers, 2017), ou encore le contrôle des armes à feu (Aubin, 2018) en articulant sociologie du journalisme et sociologie des problèmes publics afin de rendre compte de la fonction qu'occupent les journalistes quant aux processus de structuration d'un problème « s'imposant comme "quelque chose" à propos de quoi "quelqu'un" doit faire quelque chose » (Gusfield, [1981], 2008: p 5).…”