The Dorsal Fin

A Cleveland.com article, Shark Week about to begin on the Discovery Channel, discusses how “the Discovery Channel every year charts a tricky course between exploiting our fear of sharks and demythologizing them.” The article makes the statement, “If ever an animal was burdened with an image problem, it’s the shark.”

Sharks like this white shark are facing an image problem,
largely due to media portrayals of sharks as mindless man-eaters.

The article goes on to quote, John Ford, president and general manager of Discovery Channel, as saying the following…

“We do play off the fear to some degree.That’s good marketing. But we also give people solid information, and viewers understand that. We play with people’s fears, but we ultimately allay them. One thing we do is run regular public service spots about dangers facing shark populations. After all, if sharks could experience fear, they would be much more fearful of us.”

I wonder if by “us,” Ford meant humans, in general, or the Discovery Channel. Running public service announcements about the decline in shark populations during programming that is promoted primarily by media campaigns featuring fictitious shark attacks on humans (and even dogs) hardly makes sense (although, it will likely make plenty of “cents” for Discovery).

At this point, I know I’m beating a dead horse, but I really feel like Discovery Channel’s YouTube campaign is just going overboard, particularly the Shark Week 2009 promotional video below, titled “Swimming girl is in for a surprise,” in which a girl is swimming along and is then snatched by an unseen force (presumably a shark). It’s followed by some bloody “Shark Week” text and then a Discovery Channel logo with the Earth apparently bleeding in the water.

If that’s not enough, Discovery’s YouTube channel page features a watery background with blood and articles of clothing floating about. The first seven videos in their “Shark Week Archives” playlist focus on shark attack on humans.
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The fear-free ad

This really should come as no surprise to anybody who has been following the marketing campaign for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. Last week I touched on the fear-based campaign, and I saw further evidence of it yesterday while doing a Google News search for the search string “Great White Shark.” I noticed in the Google Ads that Discovery Channel’s “bring fear back to Shark Week” attitude was in full-force. To their credit, out of the five ads that I came across, one of them was “fear-free” and simply, descriptively, and effectively advertised Shark Week. The remaining four rely more on conjuring up fear towards the animals they are featuring in their upcoming programming…

Graphic content and fear abounds

While doing a search on “sharks” today, I ran into another “Graphic Content” ad for FrenziedWaters.com, Discovery’s horror-themed promotional website for Shark Week.

Graphic Shark Videos, with bits of flesh? Are you serious?

Discovery Channel, your marketing campaign continues to disappoint me and is a disservice to shark conservation efforts.

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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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