The Shark as Media Pet

One gets the impression that the sharks of the world have recently hired a publicist. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading articles trying to make out that sharks really aren’t so bad. It has all the earmarks of a concerted campaign.

In National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Time, and the Washington Post I’ve been meeting the same refrain: The poor shark means us no harm! Even Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, says he has learned so much about sharks that he couldn’t, in good faith, write that novel today. (He didn’t mention whether he’s returning the royalties.)

It seems that sharks only attack humans by honest mistake. Some experts theorize that they take us for seals, especially when we wear dark body suits while swimming in the ocean. Then, after taking a single nip, they usually realize their error and go away. That’s why so many people survive shark attacks. So runs the latest thinking.

The Post quotes one sharkologist as saying: “They’re not out to get man. Man is not a natural part of any shark’s diet.” Isn’t that a load off! Sharks don’t have a minimum daily requirement of human flesh!

Unfortunately for this propaganda blitz, the sharks aren’t living up to their new, carefully cultivated image. I don’t have to tell you about the Florida boy whose arm was bitten off by a well-meaning shark, or the New York man who lost part of his leg to another of these innocent critters. In both cases the victims escaped only after difficult struggles.

Honest mistakes? Even if they were, so what? At risk of courting a libel suit by the International Federation of Sharks, I will state my firm conviction that Benchley had it right the first time. Sharks are pretty indiscriminate eaters. Cut one open, and all sorts of things pour out: beer cans, household appliances, pogo sticks. None of these objects is easily mistaken for a seal.

Of course Benchley added a silly twist to his novel by giving his shark a bitter personal vendetta against the local police chief, whose boat it stalked with an Ahab-like determination. We can concede that sharks don’t hold grudges. This was wildly out of character, and a subtler novelist, such as Jane Austen or Henry James, would have avoided the gaffe of making a shark act so petulantly. The sharks in Austen and James are portrayed with remarkable nuance, without losing sight of the menace they pose to vacationers at the beach.

So why are all the media suddenly jumping on the pro-shark bandwagon? Why all the fuss over a distinction without a difference — namely, that the shark who chomps your leg may not realize that you are, after all, a human being?

Of course the media themselves drop all this blather whenever there’s a good, juicy shark attack. Then, eschewing moral ambiguity and forgetting the shark’s point of view, they revert to a primitive us-versus-them mentality. And they especially love it when the victim survives, dismembered, and gives interviews about the experience. Schools of journalism must give pointers on what questions to ask the victims of sharks.

But to return to the central issue: Why have the media gone so soft on sharks lately? Why has the shark suddenly become trendy?

In seeking answers to these questions, you have to remember that the media used to do pretty much the same thing for Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao. Whenever ordinary folk think something is evil, journalists take pride in proving the opposite, which they call “correcting common stereotypes.” To which I reply: When you go to the beach, don’t forget to pack your common stereotypes. Franklin Roosevelt could have used a few common stereotypes when he did business with Uncle Joe at the Yalta Conference.

Last year I wrote about another case of media perversity concerning marine life. The liberal New York Times ran a long article on the porpoise, alleging that this beloved, frolicsome animal is actually a rather nasty customer, possibly even dangerous to humans. I nearly fell for this myself.

Yet since that article appeared, there have been no reported porpoise attacks. Meanwhile, the sharks have just kept doing their thing. Isn’t it typical of the media mindset to denigrate our fellow mammal, while whitewashing the voracious, ugly, nasty shark?

Joseph Sobran