Media framing of fusion. Scoping study for the sociological research programme for EURO Fusion.

In the framework of the Socio-Economic Studies Project implemented under the EURO-Fusion Consortium one of the focus points for the sociological research to be carried out within the 2014-2018 timeframe concerns media reporting about fusion. The main goals of this part of the research are: i)To gain more insight into the public understanding of fusion technologies through studying the media frames of these nuclear technologies in both classic news media, such as newspapers in selected countries, and social media. ii)To develop ‘communication tools’ which are of practical use, in order to contribute to the quality of the public debate on nuclear fusion technologies. Iii) In this report we first make a brief overview of media content and media framing theories, concepts and methods. Next, we look more in detail how media reporting was addressed in previous research and finally, we present a full research plan related to the media framing of fusion.