Researcher Chat: Emily Diamond on the Media Influencing Public Perception

Who are reporters talking to and how do they frame the information when they’re reporting on offshore wind energy? This research team investigated how information in the media shapes people’s perceptions of new coastal developments.

Additional Resources:

• “Framing the Wind: Media Coverage of Offshore Wind in the Northeastern United States” (2023)
• “Legitimacy through representation? Media sources and discourses of offshore wind development” (2024)
• “Perceived misinformation in offshore wind: Insights from participants in Northeastern U.S. offshore wind planning and permitting processes” (2025)
• “Communication silos: A governance network approach to the offshore wind planning and permitting process” (2025)

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Transcript

Researcher Chat: Emily Diamond on the Media Influencing Public Perception 

Abbey Greene: The ocean. For many, it's a source of life and peace, but it's also a source of complex issues. Welcome to For Shore, a podcast for talking about those complex ocean issues.

Have you ever thought about how sometimes you hear the same voices in the news?

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Emily Diamond: Very easily accessible people tend to dominate news coverage, and it is much harder for your typical community member to access the media.

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Abbey Greene: Today we talk to Emily Diamond, a social scientist at the University of Rhode Island, who is looking into who reporters are talking to and how they frame information for us.

Ultimately, this shapes people's perceptions of what they're consuming in the news.

Poonam Narotam: This podcast comes to you from Sea Grant, a national program that brings top-notch marine science to all coastal US states and territories. This season, we talk with researchers funded by Sea Grant in 2021 about how coastal communities are grappling with new ocean industries. Fishermen in particular are experiencing a lot of changes, and Sea Grant is committed to supporting them.

We'll delve into social science, people's perceptions of ocean uses, and how ocean spaces can be shared. We're going to have candid conversations and together we'll make research more accessible and understandable for us all. I'm Poonam Narotam of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant.

Abbey Greene: And I'm Abbey Greene of Rhode Island Sea Grant. And this is Emily Diamond.

Emily Diamond: The work that I am focusing on is around how people are talking about the topic of offshore wind — how the public is perceiving these projects, how the media is talking about them, which stakeholders are gaining prominence and legitimacy through conversations about offshore wind in the Northeast and the United States more broadly. We've published some work looking specifically at media coverage — how newspapers are covering these projects and how that might be influencing public opinion.

Abbey Greene: There are several elements of how the news is written that can shape people's perceptions of any given topic. Emily and her team wanted to understand two things: which voices were given a platform by journalists, and how that information was being presented. They analyzed newspaper articles published between 2013 and 2022 about two different wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind One. These were the first two commercial-scale offshore wind farms in the Northeast, so they made for a great case study. One thing they looked for was how similar or different the news coverage of these two farms was. They also conducted surveys and interviews to verify the themes they saw emerge from their news analysis. So what did Emily and her team find?

Emily Diamond: The Northeast was among the first in the nation to be implementing offshore wind, so there wasn't really a lot of national or international coverage of this topic and of these projects.

Abbey Greene: When you first talk to someone about offshore wind, Emily, what are their first thoughts going in?

Emily Diamond: To answer your question, Abbey, there's not a single clear way that people are thinking about offshore wind because there are all of these different dimensions of the topic, and different communication sources, different media sources, and different groups have been focusing on different aspects of the issue.

There's an economic dimension — what are the jobs being created? How much is it going to cost to implement these? There are environmental dimensions — what is going to be the impact on the ecosystem? There are a lot of different ways to think about these issues, and framing is a natural process of communication where we cannot talk about all of the dimensions of a certain topic at one time. Generally, when we're conversing about a topic or writing about a topic, we're focusing on one or two of the various different dimensions.

There are really a lot of different ways to think about this topic, and there hasn't been a single dominant discourse.

Poonam Narotam: It's human nature that we can't talk about all the angles and aspects of a topic at once. We all use this communications tool of framing when talking to people, telling stories, and even writing emails. In the news media, framing is a powerful tool.

Emily Diamond: I was expecting to find similar narratives about offshore wind between the coverage of these two projects. But we did not find that. We found that coverage of Vineyard Wind tended to be much more positive and really highlighted a lot more of the benefits of offshore wind than coverage of South Fork Wind. It does suggest that we need to take a broader-scale look and not assume that what we find in terms of communication — and even public engagement and public opinion — about one project will necessarily translate to other projects.

Poonam Narotam: Emily's team saw that Vineyard Wind and South Fork Wind were covered differently in the news. The framing was different, the tone of the articles was different, and that might be because these wind farms impact different communities. Vineyard Wind is located just south of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and sends power to Massachusetts. South Fork Wind is located off of Rhode Island and powers New York's Long Island East Hampton area.

People clearly felt differently about these developments. These researchers published two peer-reviewed papers in 2024 and 2025 with Sea Grant support. We just talked about the paper that focuses on how frames are used in newspaper coverage.

Emily Diamond: And then we published a second paper that primarily looked at the sources that were being cited in newspaper coverage.

So who is being quoted in newspaper articles about offshore wind? The reason we wanted to do that is again, this idea that by being quoted in a newspaper article, that person — that stakeholder, that group — is being conferred a certain level of legitimacy in the conversation. And their perspective is being elevated compared to people who are not being quoted in the media. I think it's really important to consider that, and consider how that might be influencing what people think about these topics and what frames and what considerations are being made most salient.

In that study we found that developers and political officials were being quoted the most frequently for both of the projects. And I think that tells us a lot about which perspectives are being shared. Obviously the developers themselves and members of the offshore wind industry tend to use more frames that highlight the benefits of these projects. Political officials can be a little bit divided. But in general we see a lot of representation of developers, a lot of representation of political officials, and not as much representation of community groups, fishing organizations, or fishers in general.

We also wanted to measure representation of tribal groups, and we only found one or two instances of their perspectives being included and quoted in these newspaper articles.

Abbey Greene: That's interesting. It's not surprising that members of the offshore wind industry are framing the conversation to highlight its benefits. Poonam and I both do a lot of outreach in our roles with Sea Grant, and we know people have a lot to say about new coastal developments. How is it that politicians, developers, and some of these industry representatives get more face time and news coverage?

Emily Diamond: Very easily accessible people tend to dominate news coverage. Developers who have very strong PR, and people who are proactively contacting journalists, get a lot of coverage. Politicians who make public statements all the time get a lot of coverage.

Usually researchers, scientists — people who have an easily accessible website, where it's easy to find their email addresses and their expertise — tend to get a lot of representation in the media. And it is much harder for your typical community member, who may have insights and experiences to share, to access the media.

That's a really big challenge. And as we see more and more media downsizing, we're seeing more and more environmental beats and scientific beats being cut. We have one journalist who's now trying to cover eight different topics and is writing an article on a six-hour deadline. That makes it really hard to get broad representation in the media.

Poonam Narotam: Both Abbey's and my backgrounds are in journalism, and it's a tough space to work in these days. There's so little funding for local news, and reporters are expected to cover a lot with very little time. 

Emily Diamond: In terms of advice for community members, local partners, and others who want to open up those lines of communication with large-scale mass media more frequently, I would say: attend engagement events. Show up to the events that developers hold, that regulatory agencies and state decision makers hold about these topics. That's where the journalists are going to be as well, and that's a great place to make connections. 

I tell my students this all the time — do not downplay the power of an op-ed submitted to a newspaper. Make a connection with a journalist. Tell them you've got a story to share, and they will more than likely want to take you up on that. 

There's also a lot of organizing that can be done on social media — we're seeing a lot of community groups organize themselves on social media, and as they get a bigger presence, they start to gather the attention of journalists and news media sources.

Abbey Greene: Elevating informed community voices is so important. Thank you, Emily, for taking us through some aspects of communication theory and helping us understand how that shapes people's perceptions of, and the discourse around, offshore wind. In this day and age, we can't talk about news media without acknowledging that we are flooded with information on a daily basis.

How do you parse through all of that to find what's trustworthy?

Emily Diamond: People receive information a little bit in a bubble. Recognizing that is a really important first step — really thinking critically about where you're getting your news and your information, and challenging any biases you may have yourself. If I'm getting all of my news from the New York Times and NPR, are there certain perspectives I may not be hearing as much? If I'm getting all of my news from social media and the people and groups I follow, are those highlighting certain perspectives and potentially ignoring or downplaying others?

Poonam Narotam: There are a lot of voices talking about offshore wind today, and the way people get information has changed drastically. People aren't just getting their news from the 6:00 PM anchor on TV anymore — they're tuning into social media, podcasts, newsletters, and so on. On top of that, there are over a dozen federal agencies and offices involved in offshore wind permitting, so all of that makes it really hard for people to know where to go for trusted information.

Emily Diamond: One of the big things that we're hearing through these interviews is that there is an information vacuum. People are really feeling like there's no primarily trusted source coming out and giving information about offshore wind. That creates a vacuum — and space for all of these other voices who may have different types of motivations, whether that's the developers, political officials, coastal homeowners, or industry groups who are coming in and trying to partner with local stakeholders on the ground to try to influence the discourse.

That informational vacuum leaves a lot of space for people to come in and create discourses and narratives themselves and just spread them. And so it makes it very hard for a typical consumer to understand what the legitimate, trustworthy information about this topic is. Therefore they tend to trust information they hear from people they know, people they trust, and people who are presenting information that aligns with their prior values or attitudes. People don't like to challenge their prior attitudes either. It's a really challenging space, and I think that informational vacuum is contributing to a lot of that in offshore wind.

Abbey Greene: Sometimes these gaps are filled by information that's factually wrong, too.

Emily Diamond: Specifically, something that's come out of our initial research that I'm going to be focusing on a lot more going forward is the growth of misinformation and disinformation in the offshore wind space, which is becoming extremely relevant and is really impacting the discourse, the narrative, and how people are thinking about offshore wind.

Abbey Greene: Emily's research shows us how news media coverage shapes people's perceptions of offshore wind.

Emily Diamond: These initial studies focusing on the media and newspapers in general — I hope that they shed a bit of light on how the media is shaping public opinion and public perceptions of these topics, and the power that the media holds in both the frames they use to present these topics and the stakeholders they represent in their coverage.

Poonam Narotam: So what do we make of all of this? How should people tune into the news? Emily, what do you want our audience to take away from this conversation?

Emily Diamond: I think the really important takeaways are around who's getting representation and who's being conferred legitimacy in coverage of offshore wind. And I think that has implications for journalists — thinking a bit more broadly about who we're including in our articles and who we're not. But it's also important for stakeholders and audiences to remember that they may not be receiving the full picture of all of the perspectives of stakeholders being impacted by offshore wind when they're consuming this media.

Abbey Greene: Thank you for joining us, Emily. Emily and her team published four peer-reviewed papers on their work in 2024 and 2025.

Want to learn more? You can find research publications, more resources, and other episodes of For Shore on our website, seagrantenergy.org. We're all learning together, so send us your questions.

Poonam Narotam: This episode was produced by Ryan Campos of the University of Rhode Island Inner Space Center. And this podcast would not be possible without the support of our funders: Rhode Island Sea Grant, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, the National Sea Grant Energy Liaison Initiative, the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Prince Charitable Trusts, University of Rhode Island, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

See you next time, For Shore!