An analysis of Australian news and current affair program coverage of sharks on Facebook

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• conservation psychology
• Facebook
• media analysis
• risk perception
• shark attacks
• sharks in media