Sweet as honey: A content analysis of how beekeeping is reflected in Romanian mass media

Abstract

Apiculture is an activity with multiple ramifications, as it is approached from an economic, biologic, social or ecologic perspective in the attempt to tackle its contributions to biodiversity, a healthy eating style, the sustainable growth of agricultural production or community development. In this material we will study apiculture from a sociologic perspective, focusing on the way the field is reflected in mass media. The aim of the paper is to show the way in which the experts, the legislation and the institutions involved contribute to the construction of a particular image and to its traits. The exploratory research is based primarily on content analysis, but also on data mining and semantic network visualization. These methods are applied to a number of 2,248 articles published between 2010 and 2014 in digital format on the websites of news agencies and news aggregators such as Agerpres, Hotnews, Mediafax and Ziare.com. The results point to an image in which the dominant dimension is natural, ecologic, health and medicine oriented, with secondary aspects concerning the way in which the bees and their products connect the people and the environment.