Great white shark By Terry Goss, CC BY 2.5
Introduction
In 2017 there have been five confirmed fatal shark-human encounters globally[1] (Tracking Sharks, 2017). Three out of 11 shark species associated with human fatality are believed responsible for 86% of fatalities; great white shark, tiger shark and bull shark (ISAF, 2011). Holland et al. (1999) argues that response to human shark fatality with capture as a control measure generally fails due to high mobility of sharks. The death of a teenager, Laeticia Brower in April, 2017 from a shark bite incident at Esperance in Western Australia has reignited the culling debate in Australia. This follows a contentious shark mitigation strategy in 2014 using baited drum lines introduced by former Liberal government Premier Colin Barnett, in response to a three-year period of seven fatal shark encounters (McCagh et al., 2015).
Lethal shark-human encounters attract mass media attention at an international scale (Muter et al. 2013). Such attention has been shown to influence public perception of risk, resulting in social amplification of the perceived threat (Gore et al. 2005; Neff 2015). News media commonly frames wildlife encounters on humans as ‘attacks’, furthering the amplification of risk from human predation by wild animals (Neff, 2015). Studies of human-wildlife encounters by black bear (Gore et al. 2005) and sharks (Neff, 2015) show that detailed coverage of the encounter combined with use of inflammatory terms such as ‘shark attack’, result in measureable changes to human behavior and produce strong emotional or affective responses to statistically rare events.
According to Neff and Hueter (2013), the use of negative, sensationalist rhetoric surrounding shark bite incidents is common in the media, scientific communication and public discourse. They cited typical examples of terms that include ‘shark attack’, ‘man-eater’, or ‘rogue’ shark. The authors believe that:
‘The lingering use of the phrase “shark attack” by media and government sources to report on human–shark interactions has led to a criminalization of shark bites’ (p.65).
This rhetoric reinforces ‘rogue shark’ theory informed by Sydney surgeon Sir Victor Coppleson, who in the 1950s claimed that when a shark bites a human, it would develop a taste for more human flesh (Coppelson 1950; Coppelson 1959). Furthermore, in 1950 he wrote in the Australian Medical Journal that shark attacks are perpetrated by rogue sharks i.e. ‘…a vicious shark which patrols a certain area of the coast, of a river or of a harbor, for long periods’ (Coppelson 1950, p.8). Neff and Hueter (2013, p. 67) argues this theory implies sharks have human agency as ‘resident serial killers lurking in wait for human prey’.
The true diversity of shark encounters is not adequately presented and the authors argue for a more prescriptive discourse, rather than ideas of intent or motivation that are mostly misleading to the public. When reports of shark-related fatalities occur, ‘unless the motivation and intent of the shark are clearly established by experts’, the narrative should still be altered to reflect a broader reality (Neff and Hueter 2013, p.70).
An analysis of negative depictions of sharks in movies and television by Neff (2015), referred to as ‘The Jaws effect’, found that depictions of ‘man-eating’ sharks that patrol beaches as rogues are mainly used as political actors to further ‘intent-based narratives’. These narratives result in a lowering of policy action thresh-holds soon after real shark bite incidents are reported (Neff 2015, p119). Neff warns that public perception of risk is unnecessarily being amplified through negative fictional portrayals of shark behavior, which influences policy formulation that works to deplete sharks rather than contribute to their conservation.
Muter et al. (2013) determined that United States news media frames shark-related stories in a positive manner, compared to Australian news coverage. United States news media were slightly more inclined than Australian news media to consult with scientists as a primary messenger source and were relatively less focused on shark bite incidents and species conservation. However they also found that Australian journalists had a significantly higher tendency to use politicians as primary messengers. It could thus be argued that Australian media is intentionally presenting a coerced social reality to the public, with journalists schooled in specific linguistic conventions directed by powerful institutions (Barko, 2010). Notably, The West Australian newspaper was found to present balanced, impartial information on the 2014 baited drum-line program (McCagh et al., 2015). With respect to any claim of negative, fear-based rhetoric being countered with pro-shark conservation messages, Barko (2010) reminds us that scholarly literature overwhelmingly does not support claims of impartiality in news media organisations.
Friedrich et al. (2014) found a public disconnect in the United Kingdom when it comes to shark conservation, particularly threats from overfishing, with insufficient lobbying for policy change. The public were found to engage well with the international whaling issue, which suggests that proximity is not a contributing factor of newsworthiness for conservation. Drawing from O’Neill and Harcup (2016, p.2), it follows that fatal shark-human interactions may be newsworthy in accordance with ‘bad news’ and ‘surprise’ categories if the encounter is not in close proximity to the media audience.
The spread of misinformation about shark-human encounters is exacerbated by the working environment of news organisations. Experienced journalists with foreign news gathering experience are diminishing due to prohibitive expense in keeping them strategically positioned at locations around the globe, along with a changing media landscape where freelance and citizen journalists can be in closer proximity to events (Murrell 2014, p. 45). In the United States, it is now more likely that beat reporters are gathering international news for local publications which would have traditionally been sourced from foreign correspondents (Murrell 2014, p.40). Shark encounters are unpredictable, isolated events at a discrete point in time; therefore it is unlikely that a foreign correspondent would report from the scene, particularly when unfolding events deemed more newsworthy demand their attention. Fast news is produced to cater for both traditional news media and online platforms in competition for breaking news stories. This puts pressure on local journalists or beat reporters, who may partake in hastily produced ‘cut and paste’ items where information is extracted from news agencies such as Reuters or AFP, or taken directly from other online news gathering sites.
Hypothesis
A review of the literature informs the following hypothesis:
News media in Australia and the United Kingdom is more likely to report shark-related human fatalities as sensationalist ‘intent-based narratives’ emphasizing risk from sharks, compared to United States news media.
This study explores who the primary messengers are in reporting stories of fatal shark-human interactions. It looks at the frequency of consultation with scientists and conservation professionals and whether international news media is continuing to perpetuate ‘the Jaws effect’ (Neff, 2015) through sensationalist news content. Preliminary research indicates that Australian shark-human encounters are frequently politicized (Muter et al. 2013). It is expected that this remains an unchanged phenomenon. The data analysis may show that particular news outlets are engaging in a coerced social reality to a largely receptive public, given that little is known about the motivations of shark behavior.
Methods
In order to test the hypothesis, a content analysis of news articles relevant to the following two fatal shark encounters was undertaken, using the Factiva database for data collection.
- Alexandre Naussance (bodyboarding) – February 21, 2017 – Reunion Island (FR); and
- Laeticia Brouwer (surfing) – April 17, 2017 – Kelp Beds near Wiley Bay, Esperance, Western Australia.
The Reunion Island fatality became evident during a preliminary search in April, 2017 on Factiva and the search engine Google, which determined that this island (a French territory east of Madagascar) and Western Australia have both attracted heightened media attention in recent years due to multiple shark bite incidents of varying severity, including fatalities. Both regions are facing challenges in how to keep ocean-users safe when attending beaches and estuaries.
Due to the inclusion of three regions in this study i.e. United Kingdom, Australia and North America, the sampling is purposive. A non-representative sample of four news outlets per region was considered, however the relatively scant coverage for North America resulted in adoption of a fifth outlet for this category. The following news outlets were incorporated into the content analysis:
- Australia: The Herald Sun, The Sydney Morning Herald, The West Australian, The Australian
- United Kingdom: The Daily Mirror, The Express (including Daily and Sunday Express), The Sun, The Guardian
- North America: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Toronto Sun, The International Business Times [IBT], Boston Herald
The unit of analysis is each news publication including hard news, editorials, analysis or commentary and human interest stories. Data was collected for the period February 21, 2017 to May 1, 2017: from the day of Alexandre Naussance’s death to fourteen days after the death of Laeticia Brouwer.
It should be noted that Alexandre Naussance was also referred to as Alexandre Naussac in several news articles. In order to cover these variations, the Factiva search field was:
“alexandre naussance” or “alexandre naussac” or “laeticia brouwer”
The revised search on Factiva returned 47 results with seven articles classified as duplicates (or very similar content). One article had duplication in two different news outlets, an Andrew Bolt opinion piece which appeared in the West Australian and The Herald-Sun. It was included in the data, whereas duplications from the one outlet were omitted. One article was removed as it was not considered relevant to the study[2]. The addition of a news article from the Washington Post was informed by an article in the Toronto Sun taken directly from the outlet.
The categories are separated into three sections: Article identification, primary article messenger and primary article frame. The latter two categories were used in Muter et al. (2013) in their content analysis and have been applied to this design. They are outlined below, with more detail provided in Appendix – Instructions for coders.
Primary article messenger
- News source: own reporter, agency copy or other?
- Primary messenger source – e.g. scientist/conservation professional, friends/relatives of victim, politician, fishermen, surfer, witness
Primary article frame:
- Message or theme – e.g. information, education, culling/control measures, victim focus/sentimental, conservation, non-intrusive risk mitigation devices, political blaming, demand for policy change
- Inflammatory rhetoric e.g. ‘shark attack’, ‘rogue’, ‘man-eater’, ‘savage’, ‘mauled’
- Motivation/intent established
A coding sheet was largely designed a priori, with categories added or adjusted where necessary to cover the full scope of each article.
An ‘instructions for coding’ sheet was prepared to guide coding decisions, which allows for inter-coder reliability checks by different coders. As there was only one researcher and coder, inter-coder reliability checks were simulated by review of the coding decisions, with every fifth article checked for agreement on the datasheet (see Appendix).
All articles were read through to quantitatively determine the manifest or literal content, and also to qualitatively determine the latent content through images and embedded video footage. Latent content was examined to classify shark-human encounter depictions as positive, negative or neutral (see Appendix for coding sheet and instructions). The aim is to include both content and form, described in McNamara (2006) as important in adding sophistication to analysis beyond textual interpretation.
Results were tabulated in an Excel spreadsheet for analysis and presentation, with motivation and intent tabled using XLStatistics[3].
Results
Sources and style of news
Table 1: News sources for coverage of two fatal shark encounters (by region)
As shown in Table 1, Australian news media had the highest representation of articles that referred to the death of Laeticia Brouwer. The West Australian newspaper had a significantly higher number of articles compared to other Australian news outlets (n=18). This is likely due to proximity of the incident and the public concern with the broader issue of sharks and human safety. Only one article in The Australian referred to Alexandre Naussance. It focused on remarks from surfing champion Kelly Slater calling for a shark cull around Reunion Island.
The majority of articles in UK and United States news organisations used information from news agencies and Australian media specific to the Brouwer fatality. These generally had a ‘cut and paste’ appearance, particularly when online content was in the process of periodic update. Images supplied by Australian media and news agencies such as Reuters were inserted in a seemingly random manner of placement. An exception to this was the first article analysed from the New York Times ‘foreign desk’ written by correspondent Eleanor Whitehead.
Table 2: Story type (by region)
Table 2 shows that Australian media coverage had a significantly higher representation of analysis or opinion pieces and editorials compared to the United Kingdom and North America. Both regions consisted primarily of hard news items.
Information specifically reporting the death of Alexandre Naussance mainly was presented as hard news gathered from agency information. Given the distant location of these events from corporate news desks, only the New York Times had a foreign correspondent based in Perth to cover the Brouwer fatality.
Only five out of 46 articles were written from the position of scientific expertise, yet fourteen are written using politicians as a primary message source. North American news outlets were not found to be more likely to use scientists or conservation experts. These are shown in Table 3.
Table 3: News outlet use of Primary Messenger Source [PM]
Rhetoric and Motivation: Evidence for the ‘Jaws effect’
According to the Factiva database search, ‘shark attack’ appears in eighteen of the 47 articles originally sampled prior to omission of one article. Throughout the coding exercise, the word ‘attack’ was observed extensively to describe the events sampled.
Table 4: Rhetoric sorted by News Outlet
Figure 1. Rhetoric used in news articles sampled. Note: Blue = positive, Orange = Negative, Grey = Neutral
Australian articles framed shark-human interactions by using negative inflammatory rhetoric in 14 out of 30 articles. The West Australian framed almost half of its articles using negative rhetoric. The use of negative rhetoric was apparent in three of the seven articles from the United Kingdom and seven of the nine North American articles. The results suggest that the United States newspaper outlets are less inclined to use negative rhetoric compared to the Toronto Sun and the IBT.
The Guardian (UK) and The Australian were the only news outlets that used positive rhetoric, however The Australian used negative rhetoric in half of their articles. The Guardian (UK) also provided an article that framed sharks positively in association with motivation, as shown in Figure 2.
Table 5: Motive sorted by News Outlet
As shown in Table 5, four of the seven United Kingdom articles included messages that implied negative motivation/intent by sharks. Five out of nine North American articles also implied negative motivation/intent. Australian media implied motivation or intent in only nine out of 30 articles. This is proportionately lower than North America and the United Kingdom.
The results indicate that all regions frame shark-human interactions in a negative manner with the highest proportion of negative inflammatory rhetoric and suggestions of intent occurring in politicised articles from The Australian and The West Australian. In an article entitled, ‘Great White Shark Protection Racket’ (Pawle, 2017) for The Australian, surfing writer Fred Pawle draws from Coppelson’s ‘rogue shark’ theory to inform his argument, referring to it as a seminal work.
Photographs and video
The range of images and video contain mostly neutral depictions of information such as beach closures and sentimental focus on the victims and their families. The Guardian (UK), the New York Post and the International Business Ties were less sensationalist in their reporting, using positive images or embedded videos. The visual data does not contribute to ‘intent-based narratives’ that perpetuate rogue-shark theory/dialogue in this study.
Politicisation of shark-human interactions
The following charts detail a breakdown of three main themes used in articles across all news outlets.
News coverage in Australia shows a high level of politicisation surrounding human-shark encounters. Six articles used political blaming as the primary theme, however a further ten articles used political blaming as a secondary theme (n=16). Political blaming was not found to occur in any of the articles in the United Kingdom or North America.
The presence in the data of strongly-worded opinion pieces aimed at Greens politicians and conservationists from The Australian and The West Australian by Andrew Bolt and Fred Pawle, indicates that these newspapers may be heavily influenced by political agenda and engaging in a socially coerced reality led by powerful elites. The conservation status theme is scantly represented in Australian news media (n=5), whereas the theme of invasive control measures is relatively high (n= 17).
The high representation of political themes such as blaming and demand for policy change in Australian news articles is also newsworthy, meeting the O’Neill and Harcup (2016, p. 14) criteria of ‘News organisation’s agenda: Stories that set or fit the news organisation’s own agenda, whether ideological, commercial or as part of a specific campaign’.
Conclusion
There is little evidence of a prescriptive approach in Australian news media framing of fatal shark-human interactions. The data shows that Australian news media frames articles pertaining to shark risk mitigation as a political issue, with less likelihood of providing advice to warn beach users how they can reduce their risk. It often incorporates sentimental content, particularly through imagery and embedded video, into sensationalist articles that indulge in political blaming and demands for action.
The articles that reported on the death of Alexandre Naussance came from overseas news outlets, with the exception of one Australian article. A number of these specifically highlighted the dangers of not heeding warnings from local authorities. The lack of coverage of fatal shark encounters at Reunion Island in Australian news media could be primarily attributed to proximity or possibly reflect cultural biases.
It could be argued that the Australian media’s amplification of risk and non-prescriptive narratives have succeeded in producing a strong emotional response to a statistical rarity and has seen behavioural change. This could account for attitudinal changes in surfers who may have seen in the media pro-culling comments from surfing champion Kelly Slater or the extreme views of shark-hunter Vic Hislop, who was quoted in the Herald-Sun and The New York Times.
The hypothesis is not supported even though the North American media used moderate language with higher objectivity compared to Australian news content. The United Kingdom content relied heavily on Australian sources and it’s tabloids are prone to sensationalist content, however The Guardian (UK) framed sharks in a more positive manner. Due to the small sample size of U.K. content, the data suggests that both the United Kingdom and North American news media reported these events with a significantly higher level of objectivity compared to Australian news media.
Limitations
Personal subjectivity is inherently problematic when a single coder is used, as is the case with this study. Future studies would benefit from at least two coders with inter-coder reliability checks conducted on 10% of units of analysis to measure agreement (Weerakkody 2009, p. 158).
Given the relatively small sample size compared to works mentioned in the literature, this study would benefit from a wider sampling of articles and a longer time period for analysis, given that the attacks at Reunion Island and Western Australia have reached international attention for several years.
References:
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Muter, B.A., Gore, M.L., Gledhill, K.S., Lamont, C., Huveneers, C. (2013) ‘Australian and U.S. News Media Portrayal of Sharks and Their Conservation’, Conservation Biology, Volume 27, No. 1, 187–196
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[1] Including one fatality where a shark bite may not be the primary cause of death (Tracking Sharks, 2017).
[2] O’shea, B (2017) ‘Today’s Tweet ICWEST Instagramming WA’, The West Australian, 19 April, 2017.
This article reviewed an assortment of Tweets from Twitter, and although one tweet towards the end refers to the need for action to consider humans first, it only reiterates multiple articles in this newspaper with the same message that pushes the pro-culling narrative.
[3] This program was unstable on PC, resulting in system crashes and subsequently was abandoned for statistical exploration.