The Media Portrayal of Human-Wildlife Conflict: A Conservation Culturomics Approach

Human-wildlife conflict is a pressing global conservation challenge. As humans and wildlife are forced into closer cohabitation through the loss of habitat, climate change and other anthropogenic actions, negative interactions between humans and wildlife are on the rise. These negative interactions can manifest as direct conflict (for example, a person being bitten by a wild animal) or in more indirect ways that drive fear and perception of risk (for example, exposure to wildlife that may carry disease). Naturally, as human-wildlife conflict can threaten the health and safety of the public, or disrupt the norms of civilised society, it is often represented in the media. News media is concerned with reporting on conflict incidents, entertainment media may use conflict scenarios to evoke emotional responses from their audiences (positive and negative), and social media is a mostly unregulated forum for the public and the media to share thoughts, opinions, perceptions and stories of human-wildlife conflict. Media attention can be a very powerful thing with the potential to influence public tolerance of conflict-implicated species. The media also operates differently across different geographical and temporal scales. This thesis will explore how the media portrays human-wildlife conflict across these different scales through three case studies. Using methods and theory from the growing field of Conservation Culturomics, I investigate human-nature conflict and conservation messaging in natural history film programming showing that popularity of species predominates in the public mind over conservation topics (Chapter 2). In Chapter Three, I investigate the portrayal of mountain lions in newspaper articles across different regions of the USA, showing significant regional variations in their portrayal in traditional print news media. (Chapter 3). In Chapter Four, I investigate the changing online sentiment towards bats on social media as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, showing significant interaction between online sentiment, covid-related deaths, and elapsed time during the pandemic. This chapter also demonstrate significant effects of pro-conservation messaging on sentiment as evidenced by International Bat Week. Finally, this thesis synthesises the results from the three data chapters and explores the role of the media more closely. This thesis concludes by offering guidelines to the media to portray human-wildlife conflict in a responsible manner, as well as exploring the strengths and limitations of the Conservation Culturomics methods used throughout and suggesting directions for future research and developments in this field.