Marceleen Mosher

Educational Background

• BA: Communication Studies, Augsburg University
• MA: Communication Studies, Sam Houston State University 

Specialties

• Political Economy
• Media Studies
• Environmental Communication

Overview

Marceleen Mosher, MA, studies funding models for journalism generally and for environmental journalism specifically, with a focus on public media.

Her dissertation examines the mutually constitutive relationship between funding and content through an in-depth case study of American Public Media. She uses the case to illustrate that public broadcast media in the U.S. are a vital component of the Fourth Estate to argue that restoring and strengthening federal (public) funding mechanisms would enrich society and enable member stations’ ownership form to align with its public service orientation, allowing institutions like APM to balance the production of quality journalism that has broad public appeal, meet its public service imperatives, and enrich public trust.

Marceleen's most recent project, Revitalizing the Fourth Estate: Public Media as a Model for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, was presented at the 2025 annual conference of the National Communication Association. She is also a frequent collaborator with the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, most recently on an international research team studying the frequency and framing of newspaper coverage of climate change and health across the world’s three leading carbon-emitting countries. Their study was just published in The Lancet Planetary Health. The article, "The evolution of news coverage about climate change as a health issue: A decadal analysis in China, India, and the United States," expands our understanding of how little attention the health implications of climate receive in the news media. The researchers found cross-national differences in the prevalence and type of reporting; the most striking finding is how little attention the health implications of climate receive. Despite well-documented links between climate change and health and the demonstrable efficacy of this framing for enhancing public engagement, only a tiny fraction of news coverage connects the two.  

 She is also the author of "Expressions of Healing: How Time Spent in Nature Can Heal," a chapter in the upcoming book, Transformative Power of Parks; and a co-contributor to chapters in Eco Culture: Disaster Narrative and Discourse, the Handbook of Research Methods in Health Psychology, and The Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change. She regularly presents at conferences on topics such as fracking, water infrastructure, climate crisis communication, environmental catastrophe, and public media. In her spare time, you can find her running, hiking, and paddling across the region, snuggling her three cats, or spending time with loved ones over a good meal.