The science grapevine: Influence of blog information on the online media coverage of the 2010 arsenic-based life study

Introduction

When Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in 1610 published his Starry Messenger he did it in a hurry. He had heard rumors that other competitors, mainly Simon Marius (1573–1624) in Germany, were close to making the same discoveries with the telescope as he had done, such as moons orbiting the planet Jupiter.

Rumors and gossip, in the sense of learning about something informally and unofficially often before official receivers, have always been a part of the scientific community. Through personal letter correspondence and casual chitchat at conferences, during lunch at the university or among peers at a bar the newest discoveries and trends were discussed. However, the public rarely received access.

With the advent of social media, including science blogs, scientists were provided with informal communication networks accessible for the public and mass media. Science blogs especially work as ‘back doors’ and provide ‘access to the inner workings of science’ as Trench (2012) argues with reference to Latour (1987). These informal communication channels can be perceived coherently as a science grapevine, which is comparable to the commonly known grapevine in organizations.

According to grapevine communication theory, whenever controversy is looming or structural transformations are underway in an organization, the gossip and hence the activity on the grapevine is the strongest (LaFollette, 1992). This tendency was evident both before and after the official disclosure of the 2010 arsenic-based life (ABL) study carried out by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and published in the journal Science. The authors proclaimed to have discovered a bacterium, which could substitute arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth. The study was abruptly scrutinized by bloggers and a media storm arose.

Although blog posts cannot fully be compared to gossip and rumors, they share similar characteristics such as being uncontrollable, transcending power hierarchies, and spreading information chaotically and swiftly. Therefore, I will argue, grapevine communication theory serves as a useful framework for understanding the events in 2010.

The science grapevine and the influence of blog content on news coverage have gained minor attention in the literature. It has been claimed that science blogs increasingly influence and trigger controversies as they act as informal, conversational peer review (Batts et al., 2008; Colson, 2011; Mandavilli, 2011). Similarly, it has been stated, that science blogs are blurring the lines between informal and formal science communication channels (Russell, 2001). Fahy and Nisbet (2011) specifically referred to the ABL study when they concluded that blogs influence online science journalism and challenge the traditional flow of science news from journals to media, though the agenda-setting function still belongs to the mass media.

Numerous studies have shown how the mass media in times of controversy bypass the formal linear communication networks and engage in informal discussions. Wagenknecht (2012), when analyzing the Troy controversy in Germany from 2001 to 2005, found that scientific debates can be initiated in mass media and subsequently influence the academic discourse. Lewenstein (1995) used the cold fusion controversy, which began in 1989, to show how the linear dissemination and translational models of science communication are inadequate and must be replaced by a web model, which take into account the variety of communication channels used by researchers, including informal forums. Kiernan (2000) in his analysis of the Mars meteorite controversy from 1996 found that the story was leaked to mass media before the embargo was lifted on the scientific article, because a journalist informally engaged in conversations with scientists at a conference. Kiernan subsequently found that despite the story being based on informal information it was largely accurate. Brossard (2009) reached similar conclusions when analyzing the water with memory controversy from 1988, and she particularly emphasized how mass media help construct scientific controversies instead of being an isolated communication platform.

Here, I present a case study of how grapevine information from science blogs altered media frames during the online news coverage of the ABL study in unexpected ways and in such a short time span that responses through formal communication networks proved inadequate to embank the critique raised against the study.

Grapevine communication

In order to understand the influence of informal blog information on mass media coverage I will argue it is useful to provide a theoretical framework based on the spread of rumors and gossip within organizations.

In organizational theory, the flow of rumors and gossip has been conceptualized as grapevine communication theory in the 1960s among American management researchers (Davis, 1969; Mishra, 1990). While the grapevine in general is defined as transmission of rumors and gossip from person to person, the goal of grapevine communication theory is to analyze ‘the informal and unsanctioned information network within every organization’ (Mishra, 1990).

Rumors have been investigated within social psychology since the 1940s (Allport and Postman, 1947), but it was Davis (1953) who first brought the attention to the functionality of grapevine communication within organizations. He provides the following description:

The grapevine operates fast and furiously in almost any work organization. It moves with impunity across departmental lines and easily bypasses superiors in chains of command. It flows around water coolers, down hallways, through lunchrooms, and wherever people get together in groups. It performs best in informal social contacts, but it can operate almost as effectively as a sideline to official meetings. Wherever people congregate, there is no getting rid of the grapevine. No matter how management feels about it, it is here to stay, (Davis, 1969)

The grapevine is uncontrollable, but vital to an organization. In fact, the grapevine should be seen as a supplement to the formal communication network, and an important premise within the theory is that healthy communication requires effective informal as well as formal communication networks. Informal networks, especially, act as an outlet for imagination and apprehension as well as offering information about what really is going on (Mishra, 1990; Nicoll, 1994). In the following section, I will show how this is comparable to the function of science blogs. Here, it is important to emphasize that the grapevine is the most vigorous in times of stress, scandal or controversy (Mishra, 1990).

Another key factor in grapevine communication theory is the high accuracy of rumors and gossip. However, rumors as well as gossip can become exaggerated as they spread, but nonetheless preserve an inner core of accuracy (Mishra, 1990).

Science blogs as grapevine information

In contrast to the organizational grapevine, which mostly relies on interpersonal and oral communication, blogs are maintained by individuals and consists of regular entries aimed at a broad mass audience with similar interests to those of the blogger. Readers can usually interact with each other and the blogger through commentary threads. Thus, blogs may serve some of the same functions as grapevine communication by channeling subjective and perhaps eyewitness accounts of current events. Also, there is a long tradition for comparing social media to face-to-face communication, which can be dated back to the predictions by McLuhan about a ‘global village’. According to McLuhan electronic media was to transform the social space between people by transcending time and space (McLuhan, 1962). Many have since argued that social media like Facebook and Twitter is not substituting face-to-face communication but should be seen as an extension of it (Bargh and McKenna, 2004; Kujath, 2011).

Like many other professional groups that rely heavily on communication, the scientific community uses the Internet for specialist and public communication (Rainie et al., 2015; Van der Noorden, 2014). In a recent poll of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) scientists carried out by the Pew Research Center, 24 percent report that they blog about science and research (Rainie et al., 2015). Scientists blog to comment on recently published articles, share lab notes, announce and nuance new discoveries, and debate the inner workings of science. Though originally predicted to heighten the democratization process of science by mediating between scientists and the public, recently scholars have pointed out, that most blogs do not have a wide public audience but are written in such technical language that only peers can follow and comment (Mahrt and Puschmann, 2014). Science blogs instead facilitate the opening of private spaces, much in line with Goffman’s distinction between front-stage and back-stage, and simultaneously allows for interactive communication between the back-stage blogger and the readers (Trench, 2012). Science blogs share these features with other social media such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.

Science blogs have been described as scientists’ virtual water coolers (Mahrt and Puschmann, 2014), an extension of coffee room chatter (Tomlin, 2007), and as the equivalent to conversations in a bar (Colson, 2011). In a general theoretical approach to blogs, Mortensen and Walker (2002) argue how blogs exist on the border between private and public, and they compare blogs to the French salons of the 19th century. Such analogies would also apply to the grapevine in organizations.

This image of science blogs as informal semi-private communication channels are also prevailing among science journalists and, like the use of other social media, some science journalists therefore express skepticism towards the reliability and trustworthiness of using science blogs as sources (Brumfiel, 2009).

Recently, there have been many examples of science blogs and other social media spreading rumors or triggering controversies by adding critical comments to new scientific publications. In a Nature article appropriately called ‘Trial by Twitter’, Mandavilli (2011) gives three examples of this. Besides the ABL study this includes the 2011 story on specific genes, which could predict human longevity, and the study the same year on language origins detected with genetic methodology. Both received heavy criticism on social media. Also, the 2012 announcement from European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the discovery of a Higgs boson was rumored on social media before the official statement (Kahle, 2012).

These examples suggest that social media in today’s scientific community share characteristics and functions with the traditional science grapevine consisting of letters and informal meetings. To summarize, science blogs should be seen as part of the science grapevine where gossip and rumors about novel scientific discoveries and trends are able to spread in an uncontrolled and informal manner.

The breaking of the ABL study

The following is an overview of the online news coverage of the ABL study based on collected documents and phone interviews performed by the author in October 2014 with science journalist Carl Zimmer, NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown, and biologist and blogger Rosie Redfield. The first author of the ABL study, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, was also contacted but has not responded. The publisher of Science, AAAS, respectfully declined to participate. The use of interview subjects has been Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved by Cornell University, and all subjects gave written consent to the use of their quotes.

The ABL study claims that a bacteria strain known as GFAJ-1 found in Mono Lake, California, may substitute arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth and incorporate arsenic into its DNA (Wolfe-Simon et al., 2011). As such, the discovery would be groundbreaking as life is considered to always contain phosphorus.

On Sunday November 28 the journal Science released a press package to science journalist subscribers containing, besides the ABL article, substantial additional press material. The introduction read,

Can you imagine eating toxic waste for breakfast? Researchers have discovered a bacterium that can live and grow entirely off arsenic, reports a new study. The findings point for the first time to a microorganism that is able to use a toxic chemical (rather than the usual phosphate) to sustain growth and life. ¹

The study was to be published online on Science Express 2 December 2 and was under embargo. On 29 November NASA issued a media advisory and announced a news conference also on 2 December to ‘discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life’. ²

The media advisory was public and according to Carl Zimmer ‘it got crazy’ from then on, starting with rumors emerging on blogs: ‘Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn’s Moons?’ ³ ‘Has NASA discovered alien life?’ ⁴ and ‘NASA mystery press conference: Did they find ET?’ ⁵

On December 1 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun printed a story with the subheading ‘Hope of finding ET-style life on other worlds has got a massive boost after scientists discovered microbes in a deadly poisonous ARSENIC lake’ ⁶ The Sun was immediately criticized for breaking the embargo, but science journalist at The Sun, Paul Sutherland, claimed he had simply put together information that already was in the public domain, i.e. the blogosphere, combined with interviews with specialists in the field of astrobiology. ⁷ Similar premature disclosure of information under embargo based on informal channels was documented in the case of the Mars meteorite story (Kiernan, 2000). Kiernan argued the early embargo break, bypassing official channels, did not influence the accuracy of the coverage in correspondence with grapevine communication theory.

The press conference took place on December 2. On the same day NASA lifted the embargo on the ABL article. The online analytic tool Altmetric ranks the research article as number 16 among all Science journal articles in terms of media and social media coverage. Of all scientific articles it is in the top 5 percent based on attention. According to Altmetric, the article generated an unusual amount of blog attention with 113 posts. On Facebook and Twitter, however, the attention was moderate. In comparison, the 2013 Cell article about cloning of human stem cells gained roughly the same amount of attention overall as the ABL study, but received 29 blog posts and about nine times as much attention on Facebook and Twitter. This indicates that the attention given to the ABL study predominantly came from media and the scientific community without resonating with the broader public.

On December 4 biologist Rosie Redfield from University of British Columbia, Canada, on the blog RRResearch published a post that was critical of the ABL study. Her main argument was that the bacteria sample could have been contaminated with phosphorous so that the bacterium didn’t survive on arsenic after all. She concluded,

Bottom line: Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. The mass spec measurements may be very well done (I lack expertise here), but their value is severely compromised by the poor quality of the inputs. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls. ⁸

The blog over the weekend gathered more than 10.000 hits and 90.000 within a week. ⁹ Redfield recalls that she was surprised by the attention given to her blog:

At that time hardly anyone would read my blog. You know, maybe a couple of hundred people read it sometimes […] I send out a tweet saying I had written this blogpost and that the paper was garbage, but I only had one Twitter follower.

Attention rose when Redfield posted a link to her blog in comments to other science news blogs, including Carl Zimmer’s.

On 5 December the news media Wired covered the blog, ¹⁰ and on December 6 several other media outlets picked it up.

Another blog post by microbiologist Alex Bradley from Harvard University was published on December 5 on the blog We, Beasties, which claimed that if the bacteria had incorporated arsenic into its DNA, the DNA would dissolve in water, which it didn’t. ¹¹ The blog also caught considerable media attention.

Immediately after the two blogs emerged Carl Zimmer sent out emails to 12 experts on astrobiology to get their opinions and then published them in an article online for Slate on 7 December. All, but one of the experts were critical of the study. On 8 December he disclosed the experts’ full written responses on his Discover Magazine blog The Loom. ¹² Shortly after Carl Zimmer’s findings were circulating in the mass media.

NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown was contacted by a blogger (he doesn’t recall the name of the blog or the person) and asked to respond to the criticism. Dwayne Brown replied that he couldn’t comment on criticism from blogs and that it was not the scientific way to debate research. This statement was repeated in several news pieces. Dwayne Brown regretted his statement within days, and today states, ‘it added fuel to a fire that was already growing’. He does recall forwarding his regret to news journalists 48 hours after the original statement had been published. However, I have been unable to verify the existence of such a retraction in the mass media.

On 7 December, Carl Zimmer approached by email the first author of the ABL study Felisa Wolfe-Simon and senior author Ronald Oremland. Both replied that they would not engage in a media forum debate. ¹³ On the same day Ronald Oremland was answering critical questions about the study after a NASA lecture.

On 8 December, Felisa Wolfe-Simon issued a statement on her own website stating that she welcomed critique and would soon publish a Q&A with specific answers to the critical questions. ¹⁴ The Q&A was published on 16 December. ¹⁵

Dwayne Brown reports that he and NASA were taken by surprise by the volume and intensity of the media coverage after the blog information appeared:

I have been working with NASA for 30 years […] I never saw such a high passionate reaction from the scientific community. […] It surprised me as a communication person because my top scientists here at NASA came to me and said that this was good science. […] The coverage the next day [after the press conference] was phenomenal and then all of a sudden I’m like ‘what?’ I thought all of the scientists were on board.

A surprising volume of media reports following a controversial finding was also evident with the discovery of the cold fusion (Lewenstein, 1995) and the Mars meteorite (Kiernan, 2000), but a critical frame did not become predominant overnight as seen with the coverage of the ABL study.

It could be speculated that the intensity of the coverage was particularly strong due to the prevalence of pack/herd journalism, a well-known phenomenon in science journalism documented since Dunwoody (1980). Kiernan also observed a ‘high degree of sameness’ in the initial coverage of the Mars meteorite (Kiernan, 2000).

Observers have noted that in an effort to increase public credibility some journalists tend to distance themselves from pack journalism (Frank, 2003). I will later show how this trend was surprisingly strong in the initial coverage of the ABL study when journalists tried to debunk online media rumors.

By late December the media attention had subsided, though a series of noteworthy events unraveled over the next two years. On 3 June 2011 the research article was printed in Science together with as many as eight technical comments and a response from the authors of the original paper. ¹⁶ Through January 2012 Rosie Redfield kept posting new data on her blog, and on 30 January she deposited a paper on Arxiv.org showing that her research team was unable to reproduce the results claimed in the ABL study. ¹⁷ On 8 July 2012, Science published two articles that refuted the original claims; one of them with Rosie Redfield as senior author, the other lead by Julia A. Vorholt from the Institute of Microbiology, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. ¹⁸ On February 2013 USA Today published the peer reviews of the ABL study revealing overwhelmingly positive reviews. ¹⁹

Methodology

I will use framing analysis because of its ability to explore constructions of meaning within media messages. The method can, therefore, be used as a tool to explore how blog information influenced the meaning structures within the online newspaper coverage of the ABL study.

Framing analysis evolved out of agenda setting studies and media effects studies, but has since been used in a wide variety of research fields without a united framework (Scheufele, 1999). The most common media frame definition used in science communication studies is the one outlined by Gamson and Modigliani (1987). They state that a media frame is ‘a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue’ (p. 143).

This definition and variants of it have been applied in studies of media coverage of scientific controversies and emerging technologies, such as biotechnology (Durant et al., 1998; Kohring and Matthes, 2002; Nisbet and Lewenstein, 2002), nanotechnology (Anderson et al., 2005; Donk et al., 2012; Kjærgaard, 2010), and genetics (Kjærgaard, 2011; Nisbet et al., 2003; Reis, 2008).

Recently, a focus on the usability of frames as journalistic tools enabling the audience to comprehend complexities has emerged (Matthes, 2009; Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). Kjærgaard (2011), for example, defined framing as a ‘journalistic tool for making some aspects of a story more salient in people’s minds than others by employing specific narratives’ (p. 353). I follow this outline but replace narratives with Scheufele and Tewksbury’s (2007) idea of frames playing on existing cognitive schemas. I therefore define frames as issue-specific, journalistic condensations of complexities into meaning structures that are in agreement with cognitive schemas among the audience.

The number of frames applied to each discourse unit has also varied (Matthes, 2009). Since many of the online articles in the sample are exhaustive background articles with numerous sources, I will allow for multiple frames per unit/news article.

Results and discussion

The headlines of the news items collected in the first time slot show how the media were quick to dissociate themselves from the rumors about extraterrestrial life (see table 1): ‘NASA’s Newly Discovered Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Are Fascinating, but Not Aliens’ (7), ‘NASA: Life in Space? Not Quite, but Life That Thrives on Arsenic’ (8), and ‘NASA hasn’t Found Alien Life but Arsenic Microbe Still “Phenomenal”’ (10). Hence, the debunking hype frame was strong and almost as dominant as the expected Gee Whiz frame. Many articles combined debunking with Gee Whiz as seen on nationalgeographic.com:

No, today’s NASA announcement is not about proof of life on another world […] The truth, however, is that scientists have found life on Earth that’s perhaps the most ‘alien’ organism yet seen. (3)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Sampled articles and assigned frames.

ID	Title	December date	Media	News (N) or news blog (B)	Debunking hype	Gee Whiz	Critical Research	Critical NASA	Blog	Meta	Counter
1	It’s life, but not as we know it	1	thesun.co.uk	N		X
2	NASA Unveils Arsenic Life Form	2	wired.com	N		X
3	NASA Life Discovery: New Bacteria Makes DNA With Arsenic	2	nationalgeographics.com	N	X	X
4	NASA announcement: Arsenic-based life form discovered on Earth	2	washingtonpost.com	N	X	X
5	NASA’s real news: bacterium on Earth that lives off arsenic!	2	discovermagazine.com	B	X	X
6	Fallout from NASA’s ‘arsenic bacteria’	2	guardian.co.uk (story tracker, no framing)	B
7	NASA’s Newly Discovered Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Are Fascinating, but Not Aliens	2	popsci.com	N	X	X
8	NASA: Life in Space? Not Quite, but Life That Thrives on Arsenic	2	abc.go.com	N	X
9	Arsenic-eating microbe may redefine chemistry of life	2	nature.com	N		X
10	NASA Hasn’t Found Alien Life, But Arsenic Microbe Still ‘Phenomenal’	2	space.com	N	X	X
11	Arsenic-loving bacteria may help in hunt for alien life	2	bbc.co.uk	N		X
12	NASA scientists find bacteria that can live on arsenic	2	usatoday.com	N		X
13	Are Aliens Among Us? Sort of, NASA Says	2	foxnews.com	N		X
14	Arsenic and Old Space Thinking: NASA Discovery Spurs New Ideas on Life	2	pbs.org	N		X
15	Arsenic-based bacteria point to new life forms	2	newscientist.com	N		X
16	Poison Nil: Mono Lake Bacterium Exhibits Exotic Arsenic-Driven Biological Activity	2	scientificamerican.com	N	X	X
17	NASA discovers second form of life	2	wired.co.uk	N		X
18	NASA reveals bacteria that can live on arsenic instead of phosphorus	2	guardian.co.uk	N	X
19	Of Arsenic and Aliens	2	discovermagazine.com	B	X		X
20	NASA, arsenic and alien life: I hate to say I told you so	3	telegraph.co.uk	B	X	X
21	Arsenic-feeding bacteria find expands traditional notions of life	3	cnn.com	N	X	X
22	Discovery of arsenic-eating microbe by NASA scientist raises possibility of alien life	3	theaustralian.com.au	N		X
23	‘Weird life’: Clue to alien biology after scientists discover mysterious bacteria that can live on arsenic	3	Dailymail.co.uk	N		X
24	What Poison? Bacterium Uses Arsenic to Build DNA and Other Molecules	3	sciencemag.org	N			X
25	Arsenic, bacteria and alien life: Lessons from an internet frenzy	3	guardian.co.uk	B	X			X		X
26	Is That Arsenic-Loving Bug – Formerly an Alien – a Dog?	5	wired.com	B				X		X
27	NASA Found Aliens! Or Not. The Worst Coverage of Arsenic-Loving Bacteria	6	discovermagazine.com	B	X
28	NASA’s arsenic microbe science slammed	6	cbc.ca	N			X				X
29	‘This Paper Should Not Have Been Published’	7	slate.com	B	X		X	X			X
30	E.T.? No. Arsenic? Yes. Maybe. Hmmm	7	Sciencenews.com	N	X		X			X
31	Doubts Brew About NASA’s New Arsenic Life	7	wired.com	N			X		X		X
32	The Wrong Stuff: NASA Dismisses Arsenic Critique Because Critical Priest Not Standing on Altar	7	wired.com	B				X	X	X
33	Microbe gets toxic response	7	nature.com	N			X				X
34	Author of Controversial Arsenic Paper Speaks	8	sciencemag.org	N							X
35	Arsenic about face	8	guardian.co.uk	B						X
36	Curb your enthusiasm for aliens, NASA	8	newscientist.com (editorial)		X			X		X
37	Of arsenic and aliens: What the critics said	8	discovermagazine.com	B			X
38	NASA’s Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Don’t Love Arsenic After All, Critics Say	8	popsci.com	B			X	X
39	Critics raise doubts on NASA’s arsenic bacteria	9	phys.org	N			X
40	NASA study announcing discovery of bacteria that lived on arsenic dismissed as ‘flim flam’ by scientists	9	dailymail.co.uk	N			X
41	Alien Life? NASA-Funded Study Questioned	10	abcnews.go.com	N			X
42	Arsenic bacteria – a post-mortem, a review, and some navel-gazing	10	discovermagazine.com	B	X					X
43	Poisoned Debate Encircles a Microbe Study’s Result	13	nytimes.com	N						X
44	Response required	15	nature.com (editorial)					X	X	X
45	Scientists from Arsenic Bacteria Paper Respond to Criticisms	16	universetoday.com	N					X		X
46	Arsenic Bacteria Controversy Gets a Postmortem	17	livescience.com	N					X	X
47	Exclusive Interview: Discoverer of Arsenic Bacteria, in the Eye of the Storm	20	sciencemag.org	N						X	X

Six of the articles published before December 5, when the blog criticism appeared, included quotes from chemist Steven Benner who was present at the press conference and was skeptical of the study. His criticism was most vivid in the news article accompanying the scientific article in Science (24). However, mostly Steven Benner featured late in the article in a short critical paragraph - probably obeying to the journalistic norm of balance - without challenging the Gee Whiz frame. Three of the articles used Benner as a positive source and quoted him for judging the research claims as ‘exceptional’ and ‘a radical finding’ (8, 12 and 13). The news article in Science (24) and a blog entry on discovermagazine.com (19) included critical framing of the research claims in the shape of longer critical sections.

After 6 December, when the critique from Rosie Redfield on her blog reached the mass media, and especially after Carl Zimmer followed up with replies from the 12 experts, the Gee Whiz frame disappeared and was replaced by a critical frame. Surprisingly though, the specific blog frame did not have a strong impact on the news frame, which hints that media did not pay special attention to the critique coming from social media. Rather, the blogger’s critique was introduced as part of a larger emerging criticism: ‘Rosie Redfield is one of a number of scientists in different fields who have publicly criticized the arsenic microbe study […]’ (28, only critical blogger Alex Bradley was added as a critical source by name despite the phrasing ‘number of scientists’. However, the article does describe how Redfield’s blog post generated ‘dozens of comments from other scientists’). ‘Over the weekend, a handful of respected microbiologists cried foul over NASA’s newly published study […]’ (38, Rosie Redfield was the only critical source quoted in the article, though the article links to other critical news stories and states that there are ‘other comments in the science blogosphere’), ‘But Nasa’s announcement that it discovered a form of bacteria in a Californian lake that could survive on arsenic has received serious criticism from top scientists’. (40, a third critical source besides Rosie Redfield and Alex Bradley is introduced, Norman Pace from University of Colorado, though the quote from him is lifted from a Zimmer article. The word ‘blog’ first appears in the ninth paragraph), and ‘An arsenic-loving microbe found in a salty lake, which was touted last week as a potentially new form of life, is under heavy fire from the scientific community’ (31, only Rosie Redfield and Alex Bradley are quoted, but the article links to other critical news pieces).

From the examples, it should be evident that the critical frames were heavily relying on blog material, while few extra sources were added independently in the news articles. Exceptions to this pattern include Carl Zimmer, who on two separate news blogs (29 and 37) included the criticism from 12 additional researchers, and a news article on nature.com, which included three extra critical sources (33). The blog post by Carl Zimmer on discovermagazine.com (37) is the only one with a source critical of Rosie Redfield’s blog entry as Hazel Barton is quoted as saying that ‘I would like to state that I’m not happy with the Rosie Redfield review’. This critical comment was later referenced by another discovermagazine.com blog post (42), which was also the only one to include sources defending the ABL authors. No other support for the authors or criticism of Rosie Redfield and other bloggers were found. Whether the lack of support reflected the attitudes within the scientific community or was a sign of a ‘spiral of silence’ (Noelle-Neumann, 1974; Priest, 2006; Scheufle and Moy, 2000), where those perceiving to hold minority opinions do not engage in public debate, is unclear. None of the endorsing sources found in the Gee Whiz framed articles were reintroduced later to defend their viewpoints.

The counter frame refers to the statements made by NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown and authors of the research article that they would not engage with debates initiated on blogs. This frame was introduced immediately after the blog posts:

When NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown was asked about public criticisms of the paper in the blogosphere, he noted that the article was peer-reviewed and published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals. He added that Wolfe-Simon will not be responding to individual criticisms, as the agency doesn’t feel it is appropriate to debate the science using the media and bloggers. Instead, it believes that should be done in scientific publications. (28)

CBC was quoted as the source of the statement by Dwayne Brown, but this is not plausible, as CBC only included indirect quotes, and Dwayne Brown himself recalls that he gave the statement to a blogger. A complete Google search for ‘Dwayne Brown NASA’ between December 5 and December 6 2010 did not, however, reveal any other source than CBC. None of the news pieces in the sample included direct quotes from Dwayne Brown or additional comments from him. Also, first author Felisa Wolfe-Simon was quoted for not wanting to engage in a media debate:

‘Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated, ’ wrote Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. ‘The items you are presenting do not represent the roper way to engage in a scientific discourse and we will not respond in this manner.’ (29, the quote is an email response to an interview request by Carl Zimmer)

No news articles included interviews with Felisa Wolfe-Simon but many used her tweets instead. Eight different tweets from Felisa Wolfe-Simon were identified in the news articles in the sample, ¹ for example, ‘discussion about scientific details MUST be within a scientific venue so that we can come back to the public with a unified understanding’ (42).

Almost immediately after the introduction of the blog criticism and the responses by NASA and the authors, the critical frames were dually targeting the scientific claims and NASA’s communication strategy. Towards the end of the period, the criticism was only directed at NASA and was predominantly presented by science news bloggers. Five out of six articles with a frame critiquing NASA were news blogs (25, 29 and 32) or editorials (36 and 44). On wired.com science journalist David Dobbs writes:

This is a call to pre-Enlightenment thinking. Brown is telling us to judge utterances not by their content, not even by the integrity, reputation, and experience of the individuals who deliver them, but by whether they’re delivered from the proper place in the proper building – in pre-Enlightenment days, the Church of Rome; in Brown’s post-arsenic days, the Church of the Peer-reviewed Journal. (32)

Simultaneously, with the shift in criticism, the meta frame was introduced and towards the end of the coverage, the scientific debate was silenced and overtaken by a debate about peer review, embargo, communication strategies and the role of blogs and social media:

Take a simmering broth of fast-swirling news on the blogosphere and Twitter, stir in some arsenic bacteria and add a pinch of ‘extraterrestrial.’ The media explosion that followed has led both scientists and journalists to reconsider how they should tell the world about possibly groundbreaking science without creating an utter mess. (47)

The result has been a stormy brew of debate about the role of peer review, bloggers and the reliability of NASA, at least as it pertains to microbiological issues, almost as toxic as the salty and arsenic waters of Mono Lake […]. (43)

Blogs and online comments can provide valuable feedback on newly published research. Scientists need to adjust their mindsets to embrace and respond to these new forums for debate. (44)

The changes in frames happened abruptly, literally overnight, and occurred across media outlets and national borders. The pack journalism trend was therefore immense. The Gee Whiz frame was unanimously replaced by a critical research frame and soon after also a critical NASA frame. Subsequently only sporadic comments in support of the original research claims or evaluation of the critical blog posts were seen. This is despite the use of multiple sources endorsing the research claims 2 December and 3 December when the Gee Whiz frame was strong. It is evident that the introduction of critical blog posts did not trigger a wider scientific debate or encourage the inclusion of more sources. Instead, the same sources, quotes and news articles were referenced repeatedly. Though this seems to confirm the more than 30-year-old finding by Dunwoody (1980) that a few dominating science journalists are setting the agenda, it is also clear, that both science journalist Carl Zimmer and the news departments of the journals Science and Nature did try to counteract the dominant frame at the time. Both Science and Carl Zimmer included critical sources at the peak of the Gee Whiz frame, and Nature independently approached scientific sources to support the critical claims put forward on blogs. Similarly, the well-known science journalist Ed Yong blogging for discovermagazine.com did include sources both supporting Felisa Wolfe-Simon and criticizing Rosie Redfield’s blog post at a time when the critical research frame and critical NASA frame were the strongest. These counter-measures did not resonate in the mainstream media coverage.

Conclusion

Through framing analysis I have shown how the introduction of blog information changed the framing of the ABL study in 2010.

Rumors and gossip defined as informal communication influenced the media coverage from start to beginning: Social media initiated the false rumors about the findings of extraterrestrial life before the official embargo lift on the ABL article. The science grapevine on blogs provided enough information about the study to allow a journalist to break the embargo in The Sun. Debunking of blog rumors dominated the first wave of online news coverage. Blog posts and the spread of them on social media were crucial in changing the framing of the story from Gee Whiz to a critical frame. And, finally, bloggers started the rumor that NASA would not engage with critique put forward on blogs. Only within a very narrow window from December 2 to December 3 did information from formal science communication channels e.g. the journal Science and the research institution NASA dominate online news about the research.

The study was limited to a selection of online news media, but tentatively shows how small pieces of informal communication on the online science grapevine can radically alter the media coverage of science topics in a pace not seen in science communication before. The controversy over the ABL study was created and fed through the science grapevine without being influenced by traditional formal communication channels in any significant way (Q&A from researchers and technical comments published by Science arrived after the media storm had past). This is in line with how the grapevine works within organizations. In times of controversy, fast spreading grapevine information becomes dominant and uncontrollable much faster than possible through formal communication channels. Though, it remains speculative if the analogy between the blogosphere and the grapevine presented in this case study can be transferred to online media coverage of science blogs in general.

According to grapevine communication theory the only way of counteracting the damaging activity on the grapevine is to make formal, accurate information available as soon as possible. These recommendations were not followed by the official scientific information sources surrounding the ABL study.

To avoid such an intense, unstoppable, short-lived and damaging media storm as seen with the coverage of the ABL study in the future, the blog environment and other informal online communication channels needs to be acknowledged and understood among mass media and within the scientific community. Especially, either party should not underestimate the power of the science grapevine as a radical online news coverage game-changer.