Tracking a half century of media reporting on gray wolves

Abstract

Natural resource and wildlife managers must balance the disparate priorities of a diversity of stakeholders. To manage these priorities, a firm understanding of topics salient to the public is needed. The media often report on issues of importance to the public; therefore, these reports may be a useful measure of public interest. However, efficient methods for distinguishing diverse topics related to a wildlife management issue reported in the media and changes in the salience of those topics have been lacking. We used latent Dirichlet allocation, a Bayesian mixture model, to quantitatively assess the salience of topics surrounding the gray wolf (Canis lupus), which was reintroduced to Idaho (U.S.A.) in 1995. We analyzed articles published from 1960 to 2015 in an Idaho newspaper. We identified 6 distinct topics associated with gray wolves: policy, hunting, biological status, implementation of management, recovery, and human‐wolf conflict. The salience of topics pre‐ and postreintroduction of wolves (1995) and pre‐ and postdelisting of wolves from the U.S. Endangered Species Act (2009) differed significantly, underscoring that these events were turning points in how issues were being publicly discussed and framed. Articles written by the local reporters were more likely to report on topics regarding conflict between humans and wolves, whereas articles sourced from a national outlet reported more on topics pertaining to wolf policy and biological status. In the context of managing a contentious, far‐ranging, and long‐lived wildlife species, our methods can help guide the location and timing of a suite of management strategies (e.g., media relation plans and stakeholder engagement) that promote human‐wildlife coexistence across different landscapes.

Human-carnivore relations: conflicts, tolerance and coexistence in the American West

“…First, a large body of literature documents a general positive attitude toward wolves and wolf recovery by the general public (e.g. Browne-Nuñez et al 2015, Killion et al 2019). This tendency has also been shown towards coyotes (George et al 2016).…”

Are We Coexisting With Carnivores in the American West?

“…Although public discourse includes fearful rhetoric about wolves' predatory behavior toward humans (Barnes, 2013;Berlin, 2013; a legitimate concern more so in contexts outside North America, e.g., Behdarvand et al, 2014), measured risk perceptions of wolves have been associated with vulnerable others (e.g., domestic animals) over personal safety and interests (Lute and Gore, 2019). Thus, although bears attack humans more than wolves do (Penteriani et al, 2016), risk associated with wolves seems to dominate policy discourse (Chandelier et al, 2018;Killion et al, 2018) and impede the pursuit of a shared and acceptable level of risk. This discrepancy may be rooted in biases that arise from human perceptions of species and their traits (Lorimer, 2007;Veríssimo et al, 2017).…”

Wolf Media Coverage in the Region of Castilla y León (Spain): Variations over Time and in Two Contrasting Socio-Ecological Settings

“…El Norte de Castilla publishes different editions in four provinces (Salamanca and Segovia to the south of the River Douro and Palencia and Valladolid to the north), although it covers the entire region. I reviewed all the documents and removed those in which the word "wolf" did not refer to the animal [2,12]. For the analyses, I differentiated between: (1) documents that referred to the north and south of the River Douro and those that could not be assigned to any of the aforementioned categories, that is, those Figure 1.…”

“…In France, for example, the topics employed to portray wolves were found to differ in regional and national newspapers [2]. In addition, wolf-related topics varied in North America following changes in wolf conservation status [12]. As these previous studies suggest, wolf media coverage is dynamic and context-specific.…”

“…In this sense, evaluating the topics relayed in the media and how they are portrayed is critical for gaining insight into interactions between humans and large carnivores [2,11]. It is also important to track these topics over time, because it may help identify factors that influence the frequency of exposure of each topic in the media [12]. In this regard, content analysis is a very useful method for identifying the main topics relayed in newspaper articles and is increasingly used in studies that address the media coverage of large carnivores [2,9,13].…”