July 14, 2020 — If there’s one thing most of the public knows about shark conservation, it’s that they’re under siege by global fleets of vessels that scoop them up, cut off their fins and deposit them back into the ocean to drown, a cruel practice known as shark finning.
But what if that practice, while real, isn’t the singular threat it’s made out to be?
“There are many threats facing sharks, but one, which is not the biggest threat, gets the most attention,” says David Shiffman, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University who studies shark conservation.
An analysis of ten years’ worth of media reports, published in June by Shiffman et al in the open-access journal iScience, shows that two-thirds of all articles about threats to sharks focused on finning and the trade in shark fins — two separate issues that are conflated so frequently, write the authors, that “it was impossible to tease these two threats apart.”
A more pressing threat, overfishing, was mentioned in just four of ten articles. Recreational fishing for sharks, which the authors call an emerging threat, only made it into a tenth of the articles.
Critically endangered sharks, meanwhile, got a tiny fraction of the attention of the better-known species, like great white sharks. They showed up just 20 times in nearly 2,000 articles.
The result of the skewed media coverage, Shiffman says, is that “a concerned citizen learning about this important issue from newspapers would be badly misinformed,” which could lead them to support policies that, at best, won’t work.
Mongabay reached Shiffman over email for an interview that’s been edited lightly for length and clarity.