*Article* **Jumping the Shark: White Shark Representations in** *Great White Serial Killer Lives***—The Fear and the (Pseudo-)Science**

**Iri Cermak**

Independent Researcher, Hallandale Beach, FL 33009, USA; icermakresearch@protonmail.com

**Abstract:** Sharks are among the most endangered nonhuman animals on the planet because of industrial fishing, the shark meat and fin trade, expanding recreational fishing, and other anthropogenic causes. White sharks (*Carcharodon carcharias*), the most visible in popular culture, remain vulnerable (VU, IUCN Red List) and understudied, although population recovery is having a measure of success in regions like the Eastern Pacific and the Northern Atlantic of the United States. As numbers rise, *Jaws* associations also remain in vogue in programming that emphasizes human–wildlife\*\* conflict such as Shark Week's *Great White Serial Killer Lives*. Network marketing typically promotes this content by hyping shark science. Textual analysis, however, suggests that exposure to pseudoscientific narratives and unethical fear-inducing images is counterproductive to wider support for conservation programs and public recognition for sharks' rights to their habitats.

**Keywords:** white sharks (*Carcharodon carcharias)*; shark–human conflict; predators/carnivores and perceived threat; fear; science; pseudoscience; *Jaws*; media representation

**Citation:** Cermak, Iri. 2021. Jumping the Shark: White Shark Representations in *Great White Serial Killer Lives*—The Fear and the (Pseudo-)Science. *Journalism and Media* 2: 584–604. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/journalmedia2040035

Academic Editors: Carrie P. Freeman and Núria Almiron

Received: 1 August 2021 Accepted: 22 September 2021 Published: 13 October 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Sharks are captivating nonhuman animals who, like many of their terrestrial counterparts, are under threat of extinction from anthropogenic causes (Dulvy et al. 2017). Approximately 100 million sharks per year are taken by both legal and illegal commercial fisheries both for the shark meat and the shark fin trade (Hammerton and Ford 2018) and as a result of overfishing and by-catch (Cardeñosa et al. 2018; Ferretti et al. 2010). Increasing demand for consumer goods that range from pet food and cosmetics to vaccine adjuvants as well as booming recreational fishing are contributing to the depletion of these populations. Threats from plastic pollution (Environmental News Network 2020), mercury and arsenic toxicity (Barcia et al. 2020), ocean acidification and dead zones (Vidal 2004), dwindling refuges (Letessier et al. 2019), and other hazards also persist in their habitats. As apex carnivores who comprise over 500 species present on the planet for 420 million years, sharks regulate food webs, and their loss influences the functioning and resilience of marine ecosystems (Heupel et al. 2014).

The Sixth Mass Extinction (Steffen et al. 2007; Ceballos et al. 2015) continues to impact sharks at variable rates. Because habitats, morphology, and reproductive rates vary among species, broad sustainability criteria do not apply, even as the recovery of populations remains expedient. White sharks (*Carcharodon carcharias*), the most visible and popular in the media, are at globally vulnerable levels (VU), while the number of mature individuals continues to decrease (IUCN Red List 2020). Population distribution in most regions is also understudied because of the difficulty in investigating large migratory marine nonhuman animals even as technology continues to improve (Huveneers et al. 2018, p. 1). Despite that some areas like the Eastern Pacific and the Northwest Atlantic are seeing a relative population rebound (Guerra 2019, p. 369; Huveneers et al. 2018, p. 3), in most, figures continue to be modest, ranging from the 100 s to the 1000 s, and risk of overexploitation remains high (Huveneers et al. 2018). In many others, data is limited, and reliable abundance indicators are lacking (Huveneers et al. 2018, pp. 2–3). As a pelagic species, white sharks are also in need of transnational protections in Exclusive Economic

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Zones (EEZ) and data on socio-economic and cultural indicators to enhance protections (Dulvy et al. 2017, p. R566).

Despite an upsurge in human population (Rees 2020) and more people moving to or recreating on the coasts, negative shark–human interactions remain at low levels (International Shark Attack File 2019). Despite being low-probability, high-consequence events, private individuals, governments, and media scrutinize them by engaging negative emotions (Sunstein 2002, p. 84). Media treat these incidents as high-impact and high-affect, as well as newsworthy and saleable, due to their potential for dramatization as detrimental to human personal safety, property, economic viability, and recreational prerogatives (Guerra 2019, p. 369; Nyhus 2016). Although TV programs are meant to help fill the knowledge gap by delivering science in an entertaining fashion, media also remain focused on human–wildlife conflict with large sharks. Reliance on fear through gory reenactments of incidents and their scarring aftereffects minimizes science by way of pseudoscientific *Jaws*-like formulas (Neff 2015; Evans 2015, pp. 265–66; Metz 2008) that have transformed the white shark into a media cash cow (Parker 2016). This focus, moreover, displaces attention from the shark species and populations in urgent need of recovery (Shiffman et al. 2020) and negatively impacts public opinion and support for conservation and effective policy-making (Hardiman et al. 2020; Neff and Hueter 2013; Bornatowski et al. 2019, p. 34). It also fundamentally distracts from the vision that sharks have intrinsic rights to their habitats.

#### **1. Literature Review**

Media remain primary sources for the human manufacture of relations with nonhuman animals through narratives and imagery that speak to dominance and exploitation as normative social behaviors (Linné 2015, p. 58). Disparagement of apex species usually occurs when humans are outcompeted for shared space or resources (Ford and Hammerton 2020, p. 152). Human–wildlife conflict can therefore trigger intense emotions that hinge on mental representations of a species, beliefs about humans' place in the nonhuman world, and the degree of situational control that determines how much an individual is willing to cede to the survival of other species (Jürgens and Hacket 2021, p. 11).

Shark–human relations, however, are not monochromatic but diverse and contingent on both human and shark agencies. For humans with knowledge of the marine environment, shark experiences are highly individual and dependent on value-based relationships with both the ocean and its inhabitants (Gibbs 2020, p. 8). The nature of encounters can hinge on knowledge of species behavior during the day, night, or season; feeding patterns; prey occurrence; and visibility (Parletta 2019; Gibbs 2020, p. 10). Sharks are also known for their ease in attracting humans with their beauty, calm demeanor, curiosity, and even shyness (Gibbs 2020, pp. 9–10, 11–14). Since dramatic shark–human encounters accounted for as "attacks" make it into the official record while other kinds of experiences (positive or neutral) are excluded, what is reported is typically reshaped in media products through overemphasis on affect and unfavorable anthropomorphic projections that demonstrate a consistent negative bias toward sharks.

Studies show that media reporting is overwhelmingly driven by shark-on-human violence. A 2012 U.S. and Australian study on print media articles between 2000 and 2010, for example, showed that shark incidents, labeled "attacks", were featured over five times conservation and other concerns (Muter et al. 2013, p. 190). Implicit geographical bias detrimental to sharks has also been found to be common in the reporting of terrestrial versus aquatic human–wildlife conflict. Findings from a 2018 study revealed that in human–wildlife conflict media reports between 1875 and 2017, those from developed countries highlighted shark incidents 65 percent of the time, while, in developing countries, 90 percent focused on terrestrial human–wildlife conflict. Shark incidents in these reports were sensationalized as "attacks" (Bornatowski et al. 2019, pp. 33–34).

Media reportage also aggravates conflict by implying express calculation on the part of the shark through the use of labels like "vicious", "savage", "killer", and "monster" (Simmons and Mehmet 2018). An analysis of language in 310 articles on human fatalities during Western Australia shark encounters between August 2010 and April 2014 generated a direct linkage between "shark" and the value-laden term "attack" as well as associative terms like "man-eater", "rogue", "killer", "monster", "horror", "Jaws", and even "sighting" as prescriptive of risk (McCagh et al. 2015, pp. 274–75). A study of Facebook pages of Australian media—i.e., newspapers, television, and radio– also uncovered a similar emphasis on white sharks in threatening interactions with humans as well as recurrent use of the term "attack" along with mitigation and/or deterrents such as culling (Le Busque et al. 2019).

Post-incident accounts, for their part, also tend to exploit the language of crime to describe shark suspects as elusive by "giving authorities the slip" or fleeing the scene like a "fugitive from justice" (Peace 2015). Reports also further the impression that shark populations are rebounding and fast approaching the status of nuisance or vermin through references to a surge in incidents and a focus on their succession (Bornatowski et al. 2019, p. 34; Sabatier and Huveneers 2018; Miller 2003). These allegations not only imply that sharks are not as endangered but that they are potentially fair game for eradication.

Othering media discourses that demand vilification of sharks as apex species chiefly bank on fear (Ford and Hammerton 2020). These discourses amplify the perceived risk of being bitten and/or killed by a shark and influence social tolerance of these nonhuman species by exacerbating difficulties in managing their populations (Myrick and Evans 2014, pp. 547, 557; Guerra 2019, p. 370; Sabatier and Huveneers 2018, p. 338). Even mere exposure to media headlines about shark–human interactions has been found to amplify risk perception (Le Busque et al. 2021a). Fear amplification is pernicious because it aggravates perceived human–wildlife conflict, given that simply due to perceived harm, the greater the fear of the nonhuman animal or species, the higher the chance exists for his or her elimination (Guerra 2019, p. 369; Hammerton and Ford 2018; Ordiz et al. 2013; Le Busque et al. 2021a). Fear is also linked to short-term responses and lethal control policy-making regardless of the seriousness of events, the effectiveness of results, or the lack of public support for culling programs (Pepin-Neff and Wynter 2018a; Gibbs 2020, pp. 12, 15; McCagh et al. 2015, p. 276).

Studies show that fear is also the prime driver in the business of selling sharks to TV audiences, with the most recent viewing exacting the greatest anxiety (Myrick and Evans 2014, p. 559), likely due to the medium's ability to translate events into the present (Edgerton 2001, p. 3). Shark programming capitalizes on human fear to such an extent that a mere 60 s of background music in shark documentaries influences perceptions of the species as savage and violent, with visuals or without (Nosal et al. 2016, pp. 6, 11, 13). Participants in a survey on fear of sharks also predictably linked these nonhuman animals to large size, teeth, predatorial behavior, blood, danger, and death, as well as fear of the ocean and open-ocean swimming after drowning and water depth (Le Busque et al. 2021b, pp. 4–5). Despite sharks' status as some of the most endangered species in the world (Shiffman 2018), human fear of these nonhuman animals has come to drive what media about the species are produced, what kind of content is disseminated, and what messages are persistently communicated (Merskin 2018, p. 46).
