Coverage of Biosecurity Challenges in the US and NZ Press

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Donald Matheson, whose focus is on the journalistic reporting on invasive species in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, as a case study of reporting on the biodiversity crisis more generally. Globally, some half a million non-native species have been introduced to new ecosystems; this demonstrates the impact of human factors such as colonialism, globalisation, tourism, and climate change. This in turn impacts on agriculture, health, and Indigenous cultures, and drives accelerating biodiversity loss. Indeed, the US and New Zealand have the two most threatened ecosystems globally.

The present project examines journalistic coverage of biosecurity, then, as a case study of journalism’s broader response to the politics of the Anthropocene, and of creeping crises overall. What roles do journalists seek to play in this biosecurity space; how do they cover these challenges for audiences; and what resources do they need to do their jobs well? The project examined some 300 tweets from US and NZ journalists, and interviewed four NZ journalists (with US interviews still to be done).

Tweets by journalists rarely addressed biosecurity issues, often focussing only on very specific cases; but there were some specialist journalists who placed biosecurity question in a broader crisis context; and this was seen as important by one NZ journalist as a shift away from mere ‘ambulance reporting’ of acute crisis moments. Yet the more established discourse, to the extent that there is any systematicity at all, simply uses the biosecurity crisis as a hook for other stories (e.g. occasional coverage of new science funding and research outcomes). Tweets similarly tended to focus on specific invasive species events, sometimes taking a critical perspective of biosecurity border controls and focussing on the human dimension of these events.