Communicating risks and benefits of aquaculture: A content analysis of US newsprint representations of farmed salmon

It is widely recognized that mass media can affect public perception of risk. In recent years, the public has been exposed to stories on emerging health and environmental risks, including risks from aquaculture. Two key studies (trigger events) compared contaminants in farmed and wild salmon and evaluated potential health risks of consumption. This study investigates how US newspaper coverage of farmed salmon fluctuated in the face of this emerging scientific information and which types of purported risks and benefits received the most attention. We hypothesized that media attention to farmed salmon would focus more on negative information (e.g., health risks) than on positive information (e.g., health benefits) and that those health risks highlighted most often would be dramatic, rare, or vivid. US newspaper stories specific to farmed salmon and published from 2000 to 2005 were collected from online databases (N = 206). Stories were content analyzed for amount of text covering various human health and environmental risks and health benefits associated with farmed salmon. Over all time periods, 49% of text about farmed salmon discussed human health risks, while benefits were described less than 10% of the time. The two trigger events corresponded with a shift in media attention away from environmental risks to human health risks, as media generally reported the studies' conclusions as true. Risks emphasized the most tended to be severe or dreadful, such as cancer and developmental defects, while other health risks and all environmental risks received much less attention. This pattern presented the public with a message of severe health consequences from consuming farmed salmon and could induce the public to perceive health risks as being much greater than could be offset by its health benefits.