Been hankering for a good shark-attack story infused with fear, hype and trend-mongering? If so, ABC News’ Web site is not the place to look this afternoon — but it is, refreshingly, where you can find convincing evidence for why this stock summer meme should be put to rest for good.
“They’re hungry predators that feed on anything in their path, right? New statistics on shark attacks blow that out of the water,” reads the blurb for ABC’s story, one of five rotating features atop its site.
Beneath the beseeching headline “Where Have All the Shark Attacks Gone?,” the story begins, “With the dog days of summer approaching, the winner in the battle of man vs. shark this year will most certainly be the ‘humans’ — by a tidal wave.”
“All in all, it’s been a relatively quiet year [for shark attacks] from both the standpoint of the summer in the United States, but also a worldwide,” says ‘human’ George Burgess, director of the University of Florida’s Shark Research Center.
“So far this year,” ABC adds, “24 sharks have attacked people in the United States, and there have been no human fatalities, according to Burgess’ International Shark Attack File, the only global database that tracks such things. You might not believe it from all the attention shark attacks receive, but last year, there were only 39 attacks around the world resulting in one human death. This year 38 attacks have been recorded and four people have died so far.” (OK, so it’s not the best-written story, but stick with us.)
“Shark researchers and conservationists are increasingly concerned that mankind is having a much more damaging effect on sharks than the sharks are having on people,” notes ABC. “We’re killing over 100 million sharks a year,” Burgess says, before delivering the understatement of the summer: “No one wants to get bit, and our thoughts go out to victims of shark attacks — but when you consider that [there have been] only four deaths a year, it’s not a very large number.”
So for every one of us they get, we get 25 million of them. That doesn’t really sound fair.
The piece goes on to explain that “Sharks are under attack from humans on many fronts,” especially from fishing. Millions of blue sharks are accidentally caught by fishing gear, while the sandbar shark “is going to take 60 years or more to recover, even if we put in very stringent regulations,” according to Burgess.
After some filler about the summer of 2001 (a little-noticed consequence of 9/11 was the resulting sharp decrease in shark attack coverage, it seems), the piece concludes with a final startling tidbit: “On average, nine swimmers in the United States fatally drown each day, compared with four shark attack deaths worldwide for the entire last year.”
It’s been a restrained summer, shark-wise, on the networks. But before the next batch of “Sharks Gone Wild!” stories inevitably break, producers and reporters would do well to remember that we ‘humans’ are clearly much more dangerous than those mythic creatures of the sea.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.