Poudel Sanjeev, Shrestha Uttam Babu, Pandit Ram, Dhital Krishna Ram
UWA School of Agriculture and Environment, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia.
Global Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, P. O. Box 3084, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Heliyon. 2022 Aug 27;8(9):e10439. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e10439. eCollection 2022 Sep.
Caterpillar fungus () makes an economically important contribution to livelihoods of the local people in the Himalaya. Its extraordinarily high market price as an aphrodisiac, and pressure in the natural habitats due to overharvesting and climate change, have attracted local and global media attentions. Despite the wide media coverage on various social and environmental aspects of the caterpillar fungus, a consolidated analysis of the news and featured articles about the different dimensions of the caterpillar fungus is lacking. In this paper, we assess how the Nepalese print media have portrayed the social, economic, governance, and biological dimensions of caterpillar fungus conservation and management. We conducted a thematic analysis of newspaper articles published for fourteen years from 2008-2021 in seven national daily newspapers in Nepal. We used an inductive method to extract the keywords from the printed newspapers, resulting in 3,777 keywords from 681 news items belonging to eight thematic areas. Based on the similarities and differences in the keywords, the news items were categorized into eight themes: impacts of caterpillar fungus harvesting (28% news coverage), trade of caterpillar fungus (16%), general information about the fungus (15%), harvesting of the fungus (14%), governance mechanisms (14%), challenges to the harvesters (6%), policy gaps (4%), and institutional and policy responses (3%). We found that Nepalese media highlighted the socio-economic and environmental impacts of caterpillar fungus harvesting but presented less information about the government response to its conservation, gaps in knowledge and governance mechanisms necessary to conserve the fungus. The thematic analysis of media reporting can help in devising long term conservation and management policies of the caterpillar fungus, particularly focussing on the issues frequently reported by the national media.
冬虫夏草对喜马拉雅地区当地居民的生计做出了重要的经济贡献。其作为一种壮阳药的极高市场价格，以及由于过度采挖和气候变化导致的自然栖息地压力，吸引了当地和全球媒体的关注。尽管媒体广泛报道了冬虫夏草在社会和环境方面的各种情况，但缺乏对有关冬虫夏草不同层面的新闻和专题文章的综合分析。在本文中，我们评估了尼泊尔平面媒体如何描绘冬虫夏草保护与管理的社会、经济、治理和生物学层面。我们对2008年至2021年这十四年期间在尼泊尔七家全国性日报上发表的报纸文章进行了主题分析。我们采用归纳法从印刷报纸中提取关键词，从属于八个主题领域的681篇新闻报道中得出了3777个关键词。根据关键词的异同，新闻报道被分为八个主题：冬虫夏草采挖的影响（占新闻报道的28%）、冬虫夏草贸易（16%）、关于该真菌的一般信息（15%）、真菌采挖（14%）、治理机制（14%）、采挖者面临的挑战（6%）、政策差距（4%）以及机构和政策回应（3%）。我们发现，尼泊尔媒体强调了冬虫夏草采挖对社会经济和环境的影响，但较少报道政府对其保护的回应、保护该真菌所需的知识差距和治理机制。媒体报道的主题分析有助于制定冬虫夏草的长期保护和管理政策，特别是关注国家媒体经常报道的问题。
