Every year there are a number of news stories tabloid editors can commit, in pen, into their new desk diaries on the very first day of the year but few are more reliable or more predictable than that summertime favourite: Killer Shark Spotted Off Cornwall.
It normally arrives in August - the story that is (the killer shark's probably not really there at all) - or sometimes July in time for the summer holidays, but it has been getting earlier in recent years and The Sun has already jumped this particular shark for 2011, running this today (Sky News also took the bait):
Get out of the water... it's a library photo of a shark...!
Normally we are told the big fish in question is a Great White Shark - the most reliably 'box office' of all the sharks. This year however The Sun tells us it has been "CONFIRMED" as a "killer" oceanic white tip shark (notoriously linked with a number of recent attacks in the Red Sea and perhaps therefore deemed a little more topical - or credible - than the rather clichéd Great White):
A SPECIES of killer shark responsible for hundreds of attacks on humans has been spotted off Cornwall. Officials have confirmed two separate sightings of the deadly oceanic white tip shark just a MILE offshore from the holiday hotspot.
After much speculation and talk of said sharks ramming fishing boats and eating shipwreck victims, The Sun then quotes said "officials" in the final paragraph.
A spokesman for the harbour master in St Ives said they were not "100 per cent" sure yet if the sharks spotted were oceanic white tips and stressed that people should not blow the reports "out of all proportion".
Oh well. That didn't last long (and by "people" I presume the harbour master meant "newspapers").
Hopefully nobody cancelled their holidays in the two minutes it took to read from the first paragraph to the last.
Basking sharks
Every summer, basking sharks - the gentle giants of the shark world - make a very real return to UK waters and most likely they are the source of these deliberately misleading headlines about shark sightings. Clearly basking sharks don't strike the right degree of newspaper-shifting terror in hearts of the general public, so they need to be 'sexed up' into something a little more dangerous.
Just look at this UK Google Trends data for Great Whites v Basking Sharks. The top lines show major UK search interest in Great Whites every summer while basking sharks - in comparison - barely break the still waters of interest. Bar a minor blip in 2009 the relationship is played out in UK news coverage as well (bottom lines).
It was probably a porbeagle shark, they're easily confused, especially for the people who know nothing about sharks!
Posted by: hannahdeer@hotmail.co.uk | Jun 13, 2011 at 15:44