American big cats on the spotlight

Abstract

Through content analysis, we reviewed 853 news articles from 2015–2020 to assess how jaguars and pumas are portrayed in Latin America. Science Communication (27%) and Sighting reports (18%) were the most common topics. About half of the news had a positive framing, 37% were neutral, and 12% showed a negative frame. Most of the positive news were related to jaguars (66%), and the negative to pumas (80%). Government agents were the main interest group featured in the news. Residents were often mentioned in the news about pumas, while scientists were related to news on jaguars. Our study provides a baseline to monitor perceptions toward jaguars and pumas across media outlets and offers insights on people-big cats interactions. Efforts could be directed to the improvement of communication between scientists and journalists to disseminate news based on scientific evidence and avoid the use of sensationalism when describing encounters and/or predation events.