Great White Privilege

Discovery Channel’s Shark Week features too many white men and is overly negative about sharks, the latest excuse for a meaningful study has found.

Public Library of Science researchers studied hundreds of Shark Week episodes and concluded the series too often presented great white man-eating sea monsters in a bad light.

"Discovery’s programming emphasized negative messages about sharks,” biologist Lisa Whitenack told The Washington Post

I can’t imagine why. I mean, apart from Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3 and Jaws Revenge, along with The Shallows, The Reef, The Meg, Open Water, Deep Blue Sea, Bait, 47 Meters Down and Bait.

And that’s just off the top of my head.

Perhaps they should drop the biologist into a shark tank and see what positive messages about sharks she comes back with in the highly unlikely event she comes back.

But the real crime was not sharks being maligned.

No, the real injustice - thankfully brought to light by the hard work of our intrepid biology professor and her team of offence sleuths - was the latent misogyny in Shark Week programs.

Lisa Whitenack told the Washington Post how she used to watch Shark Week as a child but became upset when she realised how few scientists featured were women. (Weird, I thought you watched shark shows to see sharks, not women in lab coats)

This stuck in her gut so badly that she decided to invest a good portion of her adult life to sifting through 32 years of Shark Week episodes to find out if she had imagined the shark sexism, or if it was real.

Spoiler alert: It was real.

Whitenack and her team watched episodes of the Discovery Channel series from 1988 to 2020 and found the programs featured more shark experts named “Mike” than they did shark experts who were female.

Maybe there just aren’t that many female shark experts.

There are evidently plenty of Karens doing research on shark shows though.

Incidentally, there were zero shark experts interviewed for the programs named Mohammad.

Shark Week is Islamophobic.

"Discovery’s programming emphasized negative messages about sharks, lacked useful messaging about shark conservation and overwhelmingly featured White men as experts — including several with the same name,” Whitenack said.

Maybe we are at peak Mike and the tide will turn. Who knows.

On the positive side, my name is not Mike and so this is one of the few occasions when the Woke are damning people for a characteristic that I honestly don’t have!

I can’t help but wonder if Shark Week was full of black people whether activists would complain the white people were using them as bait. That’s just me thinking out loud.

Also, Shark Week overly represents sharks.

And BLM - Barramundi Lives Matter.

The real surprise in all of this is that the researchers didn’t slam sharks for being white supremacists. I mean, they call white sharks “great”.

Bigots!