It used to be you had to rely on human science journalists to get concepts properly framed for you and enjoy the shot of dopamine confirmation bias provides.  It still happens, just a lot less. Popular Science just went on an anti-religion rant - and you know it is bad when your own subscribers ask you to stop trolling them - and Scientific American has long been basically an unregistered PAC. But people are jaded by that approach and it is a big part of the reason why science has basically disappeared from mainstream media companies even though the science audience has grown substantially. 

We can't complain.  Independent, non-corporate-controlled, non-government-controlled Science 2.0 boomed because of the demand to have more than one side to stories.

Technology may even make that last bastion of human-produced mainstream media - cultural invective - obsolete. Maybe we won't need actual people to tell us how stupid Republicans and the religious are in the future. Researchers in Austria have shown the ability to do surprisingly detailed conversation analysis with software. And that means framing could be done in real time soon.

They even call it the "Frame Project". Framing gets hammered a few times in Science Left Behind because progressive partisans who try to hijack science for their social issues have mastered framing and that hurts science acceptance - but in this case it  could help us understand public opinion about science. 

Understanding framing is easy enough.  If you ask people in America if we should give less money to dictators, almost everyone says yes, but if you ask if we should increase taxes on gasoline to mitigate usage, most say no even though buying less imported oil does both. It's just a matter of framing.  So if you are in science media and want to portray Republicans as stupid and anti-science you simply note that 49% of Republicans deny evolution.  But make sure to leave out that 41% of Democrats do too.  And never mention that almost all of the members of Congress - the 'elites' - against food science are Democrats. Call them "anti-corporation" instead of anti-science.

The political scientists at the University of Vienna even have a nifty term for the attempts by politicians to frame their statements to the 6% of voters that can be swayed into voting either way - heteroglossic interpretive frames - when 'hetero' gets thrown into jargon, you know you are in the humanities.

The Austrians noted the clever example of a liberal politician who used conservative speech patterns to make the interpretive frame attractive to conservatively-minded viewers.

Who is surprised that works?  When a Democrat took a rifle and shot a bullet through President Obama's cap and trade bill during his campaign, he got a whole lot of votes from both sides.  "All politics is local", said Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, who successfully dealt with Ronald Reagan, while the current Speaker and President govern via press releases aimed at each other and then insist we should re-elect them.

But the Austrian was, like Reagan, a savvy politician with charisma and the gift for rhetoric.   In a world of future technology, though, anyone can be Bill Clinton and liked by all - maybe even automatically. It just takes understanding how to frame the language and topics for each audience.  The Frame Project involved showing televised news programs to groups shortly after broadcast. They did what they could to get audiences with differing social and political backgrounds but, hey, this isn't science so they did what they could in finding people who were interested - there is a reason psychology studies are mostly surveys of undergraduates getting extra credit, after all.  They recorded nearly two dozen group discussions afterward and then processed those qualitatively using Atlas-ti data analysis software. The answers were placed into reference grids and then - this is the subjective part where things may fall apart - analyzed and interpreted by humans.

It's often the case that these sorts of models, especially written by people who are not experts in numerical analysis, suffer from the "look elsewhere effect" and models tend to get built to match the results of a test case rather than being relevant to all cases. If only computers could interpret qualitative results we would really be getting somewhere.

But beginning to understand how the individual social knowledge of listeners impacts the interpretations, and sometimes reinterpretations, of political statements can help gain a better understanding of science issues too.  When the not-very-scientific term 'global warming' was used in surveys, a whole lot of Democrats but much fewer Republicans accepted it.  Yet when the term was a more scientific 'climate change' the same percentage of Democrats accepted it while a whole lot more Republicans did. 

That tells you people are doing their own sort of framing, even of science issues, and the science is still secondary in advanced sociological discourse analysis of even the most basic stuff.