This research is a quantitative content analysis of agricultural biotechnology coverage appearing in a collection of community newspapers in Northern California and Missouri between 1992 and 2004. It examines the similarities and differences in news media frames used to focus the debate at the local level, and evaluates the frequency and range of dominant political and social actors as news sources. Newspaper coverage in some community newspapers frames the story in more complex and diverse ways and includes a wider range of voices than has been reported in studies of coverage in the national, elite press. Oppositional viewpoints exist in some local newspapers, perhaps more so than in national news.
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