Newspaper Coverage and Framing of Bats, and Their Impact on Readership Engagement

Abstract

The media is a valuable pathway for transforming people's attitudes towards conservation issues. Understanding how bats are framed in the media is hence essential for bat conservation, particularly considering the recent fearmongering and misinformation about the risks posed by bats. We reviewed bat-related articles published online no later than 2019 (before the recent COVID19 pandemic), in 15 newspapers from the five most populated countries in Western Europe. We examined the extent to which bats were presented as a threat to human health and the assumed general attitudes towards bats that such articles supported. We quantified press coverage on bat conservation values and evaluated whether the country and political stance had any information bias. Finally, we assessed their terminology and, for the first time, modelled the active response from the readership based on the number of online comments. Out of 1095 articles sampled, 17% focused on bats and diseases, 53% on a range of ecological and conservation topics, and 30% only mention bats anecdotally. While most of the ecological articles did not present bats as a threat (97%), most articles focusing on diseases did so (80%). Ecosystem services were mentioned on very few occasions in both types (< 30%), and references to the economic benefits they provide were meagre (< 4%). Disease-related concepts were recurrent, and those articles that framed bats as a threat were the ones that garnered the highest number of comments. Therefore, we encourage the media to play a more proactive role in reinforcing positive conservation messaging by presenting the myriad ways in which bats contribute to safeguarding human well-being and ecosystem functioning.

Keywords: COVID-19; Chiroptera; Disease; Risk perception; Science communication; Social media; Virus.

Figure 1

Top: Proportion of newspaper articles (N = 1095) from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK classified according to whether: (1) bats and diseases were primarily targeted (e.g. outbreak articles, disease studies); (2) bats appeared in a broader picture (e.g. conservation, ecology, natural history, socio-cultural topics); and (3) bats were only anecdotally mentioned without being the main topic of the articles. The average number of comments for each category is also shown in parentheses. Bottom: Proportion of articles that: (1) identified bats as a threat or not; (2) explained conservation issues that bats are facing; (3) mentioned the ecosystem services they provide; (4) specified their economic impact; and (5) promoted positive, negative or neutral attitudes.

Figure 2

Wordclouds with the most salient words used in the titles of the reviewed articles (words with a frequency of appearance ≥ 6) for each country (A: France, B: Germany, C: Italy, D: Spain and E: UK).

Figure 3

Effects of the fixed predictors (“Depiction of bats in the article” and “Political orientation”) on the active response and engagement by the readership in terms of public comments.