The Dorsal Fin

Last week, a story about 4 shark fishermen being rescued from “shark-infested” waters in New York was featured at various media outlets.

The charter boat that the fishermen were aboard began taking on water, and the men sent out a distress call. Fortunately, two off-duty Marine Bureau officers heard the distress call, responded to the scene, and were able to rescue the fishermen within minutes of their boat sinking.

Fox 5 News in New York ran a segment on this story, in which the threat of shark attacks was strongly emphasized. The segment also features obligatory references to Jaws.

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Here’s a fine example of an objective report on a recent suspected great white shark attack off the coast of South Africa compared to a less-than-objective “report” from another media source.

What I’ll refer to as the “objective” news story can be found at the Bloomberg.com. In summary, the story reports that Paul Buckley, a surfer, was bitten by what was believed to be a great white shark off of South Africa’s south coast. According to the story, Buckley “grabbed hold of the shark’s tail and it let go of his thigh and swam out to sea.” Buckley then paddled ashore and later received stitches for the bite wound.

For the “sensationalized” story, we need look no further than The Sun with its headline of “Surfer attacked by 3m killer shark.” To The Sun’s credit, their story does offer more details than the Bloomberg.com story, such as the shark being an estimated 3.5m (11.5′), and Buckley receiving 150 stitches to close his wound. However, (as if the headline alone isn’t enough) the story also describes how “brave Paul managed to seize the killer’s tail,” and how he “grabbed the beast’s tail to stop it from killing him.” The word “kill” seems to be a recurring theme in the report.
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Don’t let the title throw you. While there has been a recent study published in the Journal of Zoology about applying geographic profiling to great white shark hunting behavior, the point of this post is to illustrate how the media sensationalizes headlines whenever sharks (and great white sharks, in particular) are involved in a news story.

I am not a serial killer