An analysis of Australian news and current affair program coverage of sharks on Facebook
Files
(Published version)
Date
2019
Authors
Le Busque, B.
Roetman, P.
Dorrian, J.
Litchfield, C.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Journal article
Citation
Conservation Science and Practice, 2019; 1(11, article no. e111):1-14
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
DOI
Abstract
As most people will never encounter sharks in the wild, the media's portrayal of these animals is a key contributing factor to public perception of these species. Facebook is a common way for people to engage with news in Australia. Therefore, content and thematic analysis was conducted on a novel dataset comprising of 2,643 Facebook posts made by Australian news and current affairs media outlets during 2016. To allow for an understanding of the general public's reaction to the media coverage, 40,373 public Facebook user's comments were also analyzed. Shark‐related posts were common, with 87% of all the news‐related Facebook pages analyzed having published at least one post related to sharks and only 49 days had no published shark‐related posts. Shark and human interactions were overwhelmingly the most common theme in the Facebook posts with 45.6% falling into this category and none of these posts labelled the interactions using the Australian Shark Attack File categorization. A common theme emerging from the user comments was that the ocean is dangerous (n = 2,493), suggesting that people may perceive the risk of shark attacks to be high. Because human behaviors negatively impact shark populations, social science research, including media analyses, is an important tool for understanding perceptions of sharks and may guide strategies that could support conservation efforts, including suggestions for how the media should report shark and human interactions.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Data source: Supporting information, https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.111
Access Status
Rights
Copyright 2019 The Authors. Conservation Science and Practice published by Wiley Periodicals, on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.