Tracking Chinese newspaper coverage of elephant ivory through topic modeling.

Mass media worldwide have contributed to increasing awareness of the illegal wildlife trade and its significant impact on wildlife conservation. By using mass media coverage as a proxy for macro public opinion, this study analyzed the media framing of elephant ivory in 6,394 Chinese newspaper articles published from 2000 to 2021 to understand the effects of wildlife policies on public opinion. We focused on two events: the CITES approval of China as a trading partner to purchase and import ivory stockpiles from Africa in July 2008, and the Chinese government's announcement of a domestic ivory ban in December 2016. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, we identified 8 topics about elephant ivory and grouped them into 3 frames: ivory arts and culture, ivory crimes, and elephant conservation. Over the last two decades, topics related to ivory crimes remained the most prevalent in news articles. Topics about ivory arts and culture showed a significant shift in media salience before and after the two events (from 0.44 to 0.19 and from 0.08 to 0.15, respectively, p<0.05), while the other two frames did not experience any significant differences. Contrary to popular belief, our results indicated that Chinese macro public opinion on ivory had become more negative following the CITES approval of ivory importation, and less negative after the ivory ban announcement, at least for certain periods. The relationship between mass media, public opinion, and wildlife trade policies is complex and requires further examination of the sociopolitical dynamics that influence media narratives. Additionally, this study demonstrates the value of topic modeling in monitoring and assessing media representations of wildlife issues in the era of big data. Conservationists should, if resources permit, stay alert to mass media coverage and work with media practitioners to proactively shape the public discourse on wildlife issues. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.