Abstract: Newspapers play a powerful role in shaping people’s understanding, thought processes, and behaviours towards wildlife. By modulating readers’ knowledge, emotions, and attitudes, they could directly affect conservation outcomes. The present talk will delve into how newspapers have framed stories and portrayed mahseer, a group of charismatic freshwater fishes distributed across South, East, and South-East Asia. Analyses of the articles published by the English newspapers from six nations (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Malaysia) between the year 2000 and 2024 revealed a regional differences in the framing strategies. Majority of the articles were Indian in origin, with Golden or Himalayan mahseer (T. putitora) receiving the highest species-level coverage. News from South Asia primarily highlighted conservation issues, environmental threats, restocking initiatives and often reflected ecological and religio-cultural attitudes and encouraged pro-conservation behaviours. In contrast, articles from Malaysia focused on recreational and economic dimensions of mahseers, positioning more utility-centred attitudes. The present study also revealed that newspapers mostly relied on brief, event-driven reporting, favouring episodic frames over broader, in-depth thematic framing. Across all focal nations and species, news articles used few images (except in India) and rarely included voices of different ‘messengers’. Finally, this study demonstrated how AI- and NLP-based tools can effectively complement traditional manual qualitative methods in analysing large textual datasets generated by the new media. Together, these findings offer insights that can help improve communication strategies for mahseer conservation across South and South-East Asia.
About the speaker: Prantik Das is a CSIR Senior Research Fellow (SRF) pursuing Ph.D. at The University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU), Bangalore. Keeping freshwater megafishes Mahseer in the focus, he studies attitudes, perceptions, values, behaviours and communication strategies followed by multiple stakeholders to promote conservation of the freshwater biodiversity.