Abstract
This research paper is an account and analysis of English media reporting on wildlife conservation and protected areas (PAs) in Maharashtra, India, between 1994 and 2015. It is based on 269 articles that first appeared in the media and were then edited for publication in the ‘Protected Area Update’. The analysis attempts to draw out significant themes that the media deems important in matters of wildlife conservation. Themes that emerge prominently are related to issues of land, displacement of people, development projects, and tourism. We also discovered that some PAs like the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve receive disproportionately large media space, while a third of the PAs were not reported on at all. This does not imply that these areas were not reported in the larger media that the newsletter draws upon, but points to the skewed coverage and (limited) importance these PAs get. We argue that media content analysis is a useful tool because the media is the first interface for the general public on issues of wildlife conservation and plays an important role in shaping public opinion. To our knowledge, this is the first such state-wide study of media reporting of wildlife conservation issues; it provides important insights into the wildlife conservation discourse in the country as well as the concerns, priorities, and challenges of the media.
Highlights
Reporting of wildlife conservation issues in India takes place at many scales — national, state, and regional — and in several languages
Reporting related to wildlife or conservation issues in mainstream papers and news-sites has to compete for space with several other topics such as politics, sports, and financial affairs; news stories are filtered and only those that are considered relevant to the consuming population make it to print
Media content analysis is no doubt a powerful tool that can be utilized to understand the evolution of an issue over time or, to guide the discourse over an issue of public interest
Summary
Reporting of wildlife conservation issues in India takes place at many scales — national, state, and regional — and in several languages. This paper is an account and analysis of media reporting of issues related to wildlife conservation and protected areas (PA) in the state of Maharashtra, India, as reported in the English media between 1994 and 2015. Stories about certain issues like encroachments in the Sanjay Gandhi NP (SGNP), human-tiger conflict in the TATR, or denotification in the case of the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary, virtually auto-selected themselves because of the developing-story nature of their relevance This was deemed important by the editor to give the reader a full and continued sense of the issue and has, in all probability, contributed to their prominence in a retrospective analysis that is sought to be done in this particular paper. What we seek to present here is more in the nature of trends, patterns, and initial insights that can be the base for a larger engagement and understanding of both the nature of the media in general and of conservation-related reporting in particular
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