Marine species conservation at CITES: How does media coverage inform or misinform?

Shiffman, David S.; Macdonald, Catherine; Wester, Julia; Walsh, Matthew Bjerregaard; Chevalier, A.; Kachelriess, Daniel; Friedman, Kim

doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2021.104813

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…In their study of Italian media coverage of natural disasters, Pasquare and Pozzetti (2007) found minimal "in depth scientific coverage" (p. 168) in their data set. Finally, in their study of newspaper coverage of the Convention in International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), Schiffman et al (2021) found simplification of messaging by focusing on particular species types and omitting others (e.g., terrestrial vs. marine), repeatedly grouping multiple species into one linguistic chunk (e.g., "sharks and rays") (p. 8), and over-presenting some CITES procedures while not presenting others. Additional research is warranted to evaluate how narrowing of scope in media coverage may influence public understanding.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors found a "significant relationship among the roles of the mass media in creating awareness, attitude, and knowledge about climate change that positively affect environmentally friendly behavior" (p. 8). Because of this relationship, within conservation science, newspaper coverage of issues such as aquaculture (Rickard and Feldpausch-Parker, 2016;Olsen and Osmundsen, 2017), wildlife-human interactions (Miller et al, 2018), climate change (e.g., Junsheng et al, 2019), shellfish contamination (Suldovsky et al, 2018), and endangered species management (e.g., Schiffman et al, 2021) have been the subject of study. News coverage during disasters presents a special case since the public's demand for coverage and impressionability to coverage both increase (Ewart and McLean, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Shifting linguistic patterns in oyster restoration news articles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster

Fitzsimmons‐Doolan

Pollack

2023

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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Populations of the eastern oyster Crassostrea virginica are declining globally. With the loss of oysters, sustainable provision of natural resources and ecosystem services are also threatened. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill became the largest marine oil spill in history, imperiling coastal and marine habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. Whereas ecological restoration serves as an important tool in natural resource management, its success depends on achieving ecological objectives and meeting public expectations. However, little is known about how the public perceives ecological restoration—even less in the context of disasters. It has long been understood that mass media messaging helps shape public understanding. Documenting patterned representation of oyster restoration in mass media texts can help set goals, improve stakeholder communication, and ensure required support for restoration activities. To address this goal, this study asks, does newspaper language on the topic of oyster reef restoration change in relation to an environmental disaster? If so, how? A 1.1 million-word Deepwater Horizon Oyster Restoration (DHORN) Corpus—a comprehensive body of newspaper articles about oyster restoration from 3 national and 18 gulf-state newspapers—was developed for the period April 2008–April 2014. The distribution and deployment of collocates of oyster* across three DHORN subcorpora delimited by time (pre-, during, and post-Deepwater Horizon oil spill) were compared through iterative quantitative and qualitative analysis. Examination of salient collocates in use over time indicated an increase in the representation of oysters as quantifiable entities during/post-DWH; at the same time, there was a decrease in the representation of the roles of oyster* in the Gulf ecosystem. Furthermore, multiple propositions associating oysters and oyster restoration activity with DWH and oil spills were introduced into language use by the disaster and persisted for years afterwards. This association was not present pre-DWH. Understanding shifts in linguistic patterns of oyster restoration in news articles before, during, and after Deepwater Horizon can be used to deliberately refine communication between the conservation community and both journalists and policymakers to promote conservation initiatives.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shifting linguistic patterns in oyster restoration news articles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster

Fitzsimmons‐Doolan

Pollack

2023

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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“…Another challenge of media coverage related to marine conservation is framing this issue, which has a significant impact on public perceptions and attitudes toward these issues (Shiffman et al, 2021). For instance, policymakers and business leaders may find media coverage that emphasizes the financial benefits of marine conservation, such as sustainable fisheries and ecotourism, more appealing than coverage that highlights the ethical or moral imperative of marine conservation (Notarbartolo di Sciara et al, 2020).…”

Section: Marine-related Content In New Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Early assessment of a new media model for promoting marine conservation awareness in Malaysia

Abdullah,

Mat,

Noh

et al. 2024

Multidiscip. Sci. J.

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Marine conservation is one of the areas that need attention in pursuit of a sustainable planet. Human activities have led to the current dire state of the marine ecosystem. To arrest this, many initiatives have been carried out to inculcate marine awareness using various media, approaches, and target audiences. The emergence of new media provides the opportunity to disseminate awareness on marine conservation to a wider audience. However, the efficacy of this medium in the local context has yet to be determined. Hence, this paper presents the early assessment of the effectiveness of a new media model for promoting marine conservation awareness in Malaysia. Data from nine semistructured interviews with marine experts, media practitioners and media influencers are presented. The results emphasized the importance of developing a long-term communications strategy that advocates for a new media model to promote awareness of marine environmental impacts and conservation issues. The findings suggest that the new media has great potential to promote marine conservation awareness with higher impacts than conventional media. Nevertheless, further research is needed to explore the long-term effectiveness of the new media model and its potential to bring about positive behavioral changes among the target audience.

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“…This then pushed people towards media-attractive shark finning policies and away from other policies that would likely have far greater impact on shark conservation. Shiffman et al, 2021 analysis of newspaper coverage in English-speaking countries demonstrated a bias in favor of charismatic terrestrial species compared to marine species. Bombieri et al (2018) argued that biases in coverage of predator attacks may decrease support for predator conservation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ten years of coverage of trophy hunting in UK newspapers

Yeomans¹,

Hare²,

Dröge³

et al. 2022

Front. Conserv. Sci.

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Hunting is an increasingly contentious topic. Trophy hunting, whereby people hunt individual animals with desirable characteristics in order to keep body parts (e.g. horns, heads, hides, antlers) as mementos, is especially contested. Political pressure, often in the form of trophy import bans, is being applied in multiple nations, and campaigns to ban trophy hunting, or trophy imports, attract considerable media attention. However, trophy hunting often has conservation value, acting to protect habitat and provide income for local communities. Assuming that media coverage can influence public and political opinion, negative or simplistic media coverage of trophy hunting has the potential to cause adverse outcomes for conservation and local communities. Here, we analyse coverage of trophy hunting from July 2010 - June 2020 (five years before and five years after the death of Cecil the Lion) in the most popular UK media outlets (624 articles in total), assessing the overall sentiment of each article, and the species and countries covered. Ninety percent of all coverage occurred after the death of Cecil the lion, marking this event as a watershed moment in UK mainstream media depiction of trophy hunting. The overall sentiment of articles was largely against trophy hunting (63.1%), and this was more pronounced in tabloids (84.2%) than broadsheets (42.2%). Pro-trophy hunting articles were very uncommon overall (3.5%). Articles that described the complexity of trophy hunting decreased following Cecil and were most common in pre-Cecil broadsheets (35.7%, dropping to 30.6%) and rarest in post-Cecil tabloids (3.1%). Articles focussed mainly on charismatic but rarely hunted species including lion, elephant and rhino, with commonly hunted species (such as impala or Cape buffalo) only rarely being mentioned. When countries were mentioned, southern African nations predominated, with four nations (Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Botswana) being named in 68% of qualifying articles. We conclude that simplistic media depiction of trophy hunting has the potential to cause negative outcomes for conservation through its impact on public perception and political opinion.

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Marine species conservation at CITES: How does media coverage inform or misinform?

Cited by 6 publications

References 58 publications

Shifting linguistic patterns in oyster restoration news articles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster

Shifting linguistic patterns in oyster restoration news articles surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster

Early assessment of a new media model for promoting marine conservation awareness in Malaysia

Ten years of coverage of trophy hunting in UK newspapers

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