'Mostly white, mostly male': Washington Post accuses Discovery’s ‘Shark Week’ of racism!

In a recently published article, The Washington Post has attacked Discovery’s ‘Shark Week’ by calling it out for only featuring “White men as experts”. Citing a scientific study, the piece also stated that the yearly show “emphasized negative messages about sharks [and] lacked useful messaging about shark conservation”.

As per the Washington Post, the research was initiated by Lisa Whitenack, a biology professor at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, who did not remember seeing any women scientists on television. She reportedly revealed that the lack of representation made her feel like women cannot be scientists. She said, “Why would I know I could do that? I don’t come from a family of scientists. I didn’t see very many people that looked like me on television.”

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Whitenack’s concerns were not limited to representation. She also pondered if ‘Shark Week’ was sharing wrong information about the ocean predator. She then decided to dig deeper by involving more scientists by analyzing “hundreds of ‘Shark Week’ episodes that aired between 1988 and 2020,” The Washington Post stated. 

As per the researchers’ study, “Shark Week’s depictions of research and of experts are biased towards a small set of (typically visual and expensive) research methodologies and (mostly white, mostly male) experts, including presentation of many white male non-scientists as scientific experts. While sharks are more often portrayed negatively than positively, limited conservation messaging does appear in 53% of episodes analyzed.”

It adds, “Results suggest that as a whole, while Shark Week is likely contributing to the collective public perception of sharks as bad, even relatively small alterations to programming decisions could substantially improve the presentation of sharks and shark science and conservation issues.”

The publication spoke with David Shiffman, a conservationist at Arizona State University, who also contributed to the research. As per Shiffman, “When there are hundreds of people of color interested who work in this field, [and] when my field is more than half women, maybe it’s not an accident anymore that they’re only featuring White men.”