About

Melissa Aronczyk’s research, writing, and teaching aim to reorient debate over the role of organized persuasion in the conditions of public life. She investigates the tension between civic modes of discourse and technical ones, through critical evaluations of organized systems of influence, political rhetoric and logic, and media platforms. Her work explores the influence of media and communication strategies on public perception and political processes. She is the co-author, with Maria Espinoza, of A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism, which has received the 2023 Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award in Political Communication and the 2022 Outstanding Book Award in Public Relations, Innovation, Development and Educational Achievement, both from the National Communication Association. Other notable publications include Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity and Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Her research has been featured in various prominent outlets such as The Nation, the Financial Times, the BBC, Rolling Stone, CNBC, The Intercept, Grist, AdWeek, and Yes Magazine, and she has written stories about sustainability for The Washington Post and Foreign Policy magazine. Her research has been funded by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Climate Social Science Network, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has held leadership roles such as chairing the Popular Media and Culture division of the International Communication Association and serves on advisory boards for research programs across several countries. At Rutgers, she is a Faculty Associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics, an Affiliated Graduate Faculty with the Department of Sociology, and a research affiliate with the Climate and Energy Institute. She co-founded and hosts the Digital Ethnography Working Group at Rutgers and holds additional affiliations with Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds the honorary rank of adjunct Research Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Canada.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Public relations
• Economics
• Business
• Law
• Environmental resource management
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Marketing
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Facts, Fakes, and Climate Science: Recommendations for Improving Information Integrity about Climate Science

  2025-06-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  This Summary for Policymakers provides a high-level précis of the Synthesis Report, Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review. The human response to the climate crisis is being obstructed and delayed by the production and circulation of misleading information about the nature of climate change and the available solutions. The findings of this study indicate that powerful actors—including corporations, governments, and political parties—intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change. These narratives circulate across digital, broadcast, and interpersonal communication channels. The result is a decline in public trust, diminished policy coordination, and a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review

  2025-01-01 · 9 citations

  reviewOpen access

  The human response to the climate crisis is being obstructed and delayed by the production and circulation of misleading information about the nature of climate change and the available solutions. The findings of this study indicate that powerful actors—including corporations, governments, and political parties—intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change. These narratives circulate across digital, broadcast, and interpersonal communication channels. The result is a decline in public trust, diminished policy coordination, and a feedback loop between scientific denialism and political inaction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Testing the greenwashing assessment framework

  Ecology and Society · 2025-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Greenwashing is of growing concern as the world struggles to respond to the triple planetary crises of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. New terminology to label greenwashing has entered public discourse and new policies and legal processes have challenged green claims, particularly in advertising. These developments demand a review and revision of the terminology used in greenwashing research and analysis of its application to statements made by businesses, governments, and other organizations. This paper focuses on just that, making two key academic contributions to the growing interdisciplinary literature on greenwashing. First, we empirically test, for the first time, the greenwashing assessment framework, an analytical means to assess greenwashing. Second, we build on our empirical findings to propose a revision to this framework. This testing makes an important contribution to help the public, managers, policy makers, and journalists navigate the complex information domain surrounding environmental issues.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Steering the Climate Discourse

  2025-10-14 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Media are conduits for the amplification of climate information and disinformation. Systematic evaluations are needed of how cross-national and cross-platform tactics across newspapers, television, radio, social media, and other online modes of communication shape climate engagement and action. This chapter identifies three primary channels through which climate obstruction in the media occurs: (1) news coverage and journalistic practices, such as so-called “balanced” coverage; (2) industry-funded public relations, strategic information, and influence campaigns; and (3) social media discourses and structures. Following a review of political-economic factors and networks of actors producing intentional disinformation in the media, the authors discuss the changing nature of journalism, evolving climate contrarianism, and impacts of disinformation. The chapter then elaborates on common disinformation-generating tactics, narratives, and frames in each area. Finally, the authors examine information-based and action-based efforts to counter climate obstruction in the media, highlighting the need for corporate accountability, enhanced public awareness, investigative processes, and the need to rapidly attribute and correct misleading content.

  PublisherDOI

• Greenwashing, net-zero, and the oil sands in Canada: The case of Pathways Alliance

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2024-04-04 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Net-zero plans, or the target of negating an organization's carbon emissions by 2050, have proliferated among large oil and gas companies. These plans have led to misleading and unverifiable claims to climate protection and have spurred concerns by researchers about greenwashing. This article examines net zero greenwashing using the case of Pathways Alliance, a coalition of six companies representing 95 % of oil sands production in Canada, one of the world's largest oil reserves. Drawing on a corpus of documents (n = 183) spanning a two-year period, including materials from the coalition's advertising and public relations campaign, we evaluate Pathways Alliance's public communication for indicators of net-zero greenwashing. We identify instances of selective disclosure and omission, misalignment of claim and action, displacement of responsibility, non-credible claims, specious comparisons, nonstandard accounting, and inadequate reporting. There is also evidence that their publicity campaign extends beyond the materials usually collected and assessed for greenwashing by researchers. The article calls for further research into net zero communication and an expanded conception of greenwashing able to account for the role of digital platforms, public relations, and sector-wide alliances in strategically coordinated climate communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Climate Change and Public Relations Firms

  2024-11-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the impact of public relations on environmental thinking, especially on shaping sentiments and narratives around climate change. It is important to emphasize the longstanding relationship between the natural environment and the promotional apparatus of publicity. Strategic communicators have used publicity techniques since the early twentieth century to shape both environmental awareness and the political landscape on which environmental policy was established. Public relations experts have long shaped how publics understand and make sense of environmental problems, with devastating effects on our response to environmental hazards like pollution, resource depletion, and the climate crisis.

  PublisherDOI

• When Corporations Care: A Reassessment of the Debunking Paradigm in Environmental Communication

  Environmental Communication · 2023-12-28 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When corporations, particularly those in the fossil fuel industry, profess to care about their audience, how should we analyze and evaluate this care? The common strategy by scholars and journalists is to debunk, or expose, fake or inauthentic messaging. In this essay, I argue that debunking prevents us from articulating the coordinates of care in environmental communication. I propose the adoption of a different critical stance toward corporate "green" communication, and offer some resources for achieving the objective of situating environmental communication as a care discipline.

  PublisherDOI

• Branding the nation in the era of climate crisis: Eco-nationalism and the promotion of green national sovereignty

  2023-02-07 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the contemporary discourse of eco-nationalism and its promotion of national sovereignty and belonging. I consider some of the strategies, symbols and narratives by which nationalist movements and political leaders have evoked environmental problems and particularly the global threat of climate change to justify excluding populations from “native” lands, erect walls or other physical boundaries around national territories, and limit international traffic of people and goods. This promotion of nation seizes on concerns for continued collective existence, turning away from participation in global networks of culture, capital and cosmopolitanism to act as a bulwark against these networks. As such, it presents a mirror image of global nationalism: while the aim is still to take heed of global phenomena, these phenomena now appear as dark clouds on the horizon, from which national citizens must take cover.

  PublisherDOI

• From Crisis to Opportunity

  2023-01-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The urgency of the climate crisis demands immediate attention by a wide range of social and political actors. Increasingly, business leaders and companies have stepped forward to offer solutions to the climate crisis, following a popular corporate mantra of doing good while doing well. This article reviews how corporate participation in climate action has affected international climate governance and considers some implications for the promotional culture around global warming.

  PublisherDOI

• Branding the nation in the era of climate crisis: Eco‐nationalism and the promotion of green national sovereignty

  Nations and Nationalism · 2023-07-20 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article examines the contemporary discourse of eco‐nationalism and its promotion of national sovereignty and belonging. I consider some of the strategies, symbols and narratives by which nationalist movements and political leaders have evoked environmental problems and particularly the global threat of climate change to justify excluding populations from ‘native’ lands, erect walls or other physical boundaries around national territories, and limit international traffic of people and goods. This promotion of nation seizes on concerns for continued collective existence, turning away from participation in global networks of culture, capital and cosmopolitanism to act as a bulwark against these networks. As such, it presents a mirror image of global nationalism: whereas the aim is still to take heed of global phenomena, these phenomena now appear as dark clouds on the horizon, from which national citizens must take cover.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: The Role of Information & Influence Campaigns in Structuring Public Responses to U.S. policy, 1988 - 2015

  NSF · $181k · 2016–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Maria I. Espinoza

  15 shared

• Edward Timke

  5 shared

• Robert J. Brulle

  4 shared

• Stanislav Budnitsky

  Colgate University

  3 shared

• Caroline Sassan

  Brown University

  2 shared

• Patrick McCurdy

  Wilfrid Laurier University

  2 shared

• Priyanka Mahat

  Providence College

  2 shared

• William M. O’Barr

  1 shared

Labs

• Digital Ethnography Working GroupPI

Awards & honors

• 2023 Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award in Political Co…
• 2022 Outstanding Book Award in Public Relations, Innovation,…