@article{2327c20cbb064dd58417b99b03ca19e0,
title = "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 = "news attention, text data, insect decline, Text data, News attention, Insect decline",
author = "Althaus, {Scott L.} and Berenbaum, {May R.} and Jenna Jordan and Shalmon, {Dan A.}",
note = "Funding Information: Even though insects may be at proportionately greater risk of extinction than other animals (9), they have until recently been left out of most public discussions of biodiversity loss. It is difficult to anticipate public reactions to the growing body of recent scientific evidence documenting a biodiversity crisis among insects generally, but insight can be gained through a focused analysis of the “pollinator crisis,” formally recognized by the scientific community since 1996 in several key actions by the Convention on Biodiversity. The history of concern about the “forgotten pollinators,” as dubbed by Buchmann and Nabhan (10), is reviewed in the National Research Council{\textquoteright}s Status of Pollinators in North America (11). In brief, in September 1996, the Subsidiary Body on Scientific Technical and Technological Advice of Convention on Biodiversity, Montreal, launched an “international pollinator conservation initiative,” and, 2 months later, the Third Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity, Buenos Aires Decision III.11 designated pollinators as a “priority group.” By 1998, at the International Workshop on Conservation and Sustainable Use of Pollinators in Agriculture, the S{\~a}o Paolo Declaration on Pollinators was issued, and, by 2002, the International Pollinators Initiative was approved at the Sixth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP6), in The Netherlands. In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences{\textquoteright} National Research Council, prompted by requests from the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, authorized the formation of a study committee to determine the status of pollinators in North America, with funding from the US Department of Agriculture, the US Geological Survey, and The National Academies.",
year = "2021",
month = jan,
day = "12",
doi = "10.1073/pnas.2002552117",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "118",
journal = "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences",
issn = "0027-8424",
publisher = "National Academy of Sciences",
number = "2",
}