No buzz for bees: Media coverage of pollinator decline

Abstract

Although widespread declines in insect biomass and diversity are increasing concerns within the scientific community, it remains unclear whether attention to pollinator declines has also increased within information sources serving the general public. Examining patterns of journalistic attention to the pollinator population crisis can also inform efforts to raise awareness about the importance of declines of insect species providing ecosystem services beyond pollination. We used the Global News Index developed by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to track news attention to pollinator topics in nearly 25 million news items published by two American national newspapers and four international wire services over the past four decades. We found vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics relative to coverage of climate change, which we use as a comparison topic. In the most recent subset of ∼10 million stories published from 2007 to 2019, 1.39% (137,086 stories) refer to climate change/global warming while only 0.02% (1,780) refer to pollinator populations in all contexts, and just 0.007% (679) refer to pollinator declines. Substantial increases in news attention were detectable only in US national newspapers. We also find that, while climate change stories appear primarily in newspaper "front sections," pollinator population stories remain largely marginalized in "science" and "back section" reports. At the same time, news reports about pollinator populations increasingly link the issue to climate change, which might ultimately help raise public awareness to effect needed policy changes.

Keywords: insect decline; news attention; text data.

Fig. 1.

Levels of attention to climate change in both US and non-US news sources from 1977 to 2019 across nearly 25 million news reports, shown as the percentage of total weekly news output in each source that mentions climate change or global warming. Blue lines are US news sources; green lines are non-US news sources. Note that, in contrast to Fig. 2, the y axis runs from 0.0 to 6.0 percentage points of total coverage.

Fig. 2.

Levels of attention to pollinator populations in both US and non-US news sources from 1977 to 2019 across nearly 25 million news reports, shown as the percentage of total weekly news output in each source that mentions pollinator population terms. Blue lines are US news sources; green lines are non-US news sources. Note that, in contrast to Fig. 1, the y axis runs from 0.0 to 0.2 percentage points of total coverage. If the trends in this figure were overlaid on Fig. 1’s more expansive y axis, the result would appear to be a darkened cluster of lines slightly above the zero point for all decades.

Fig. 3.

Percentage of the stories mentioning pollinator populations across six news sources that also mention climate change or global warming (dark blue). Light blue area shows percentage of this coverage that mentions only pollinator populations.

Fig. 4.

Distribution of pollinator population stories (A) and climate change stories (B) across NYT sections by year from 2007 to 2019. Green indicates Science Section reporting, blue indicates “Front Section” reporting, and white indicates all other sections.