Saturday 13 June 2009

To arms once again...


...or at least concentrate on sitting writing a blog for once...My good friends at The Shark Group have developed another petition, to further enhance their campaign to get discovery channel to give sharks a more balanced news worthiness and a better place in the public eye.

It is not new thinking that sharks are being edged towards extinction through finning, as much as they suffer at the hands of those doing the finning, fishing and general killing, they also suffer at the hands of the nonchalant. For evil to prevail and all that....

As any businessman will tell you, PR is king. If one does not have the face that wins a thousand hearts, one will not prosper. Sharks have always suffered a bit of a PR problem; as one person commented once on one of my photos...hmmph..sharks should learn to smile more. He's dead right of course, yet as janet Street Porter knows, it's very difficult to be known for your smile when you have too many teeth jammed in your mouth.

Discovery Channel on the other hand, should know better. Wikipedia, the online infnopedia (the no-info cyclopedia), states that discovery channel "provides documentary programming focused primarily on popular science, technology and history". But then Oscar Wilde, the man with a quote for all occasions, once said that "everything popular is wrong". Addendum: Discovery Channel = Wrong science, wrong history, and wrong technology. Well done Oscar, I couldn't have put it better myself.

The sad truth is that discovery channel has, as with much of modern culture, dumbed down, if it could ever really be said that it ever dumbed up in the first place. That is all very well, if the only victims of empty headed tv gazing are the people doing the watching. There's nothing wrong with watching a bit of car crash tv, a tiring day passes all the more painlessly if we can watch someone walk into our homes via the plasma screen, and show us that things aren't so bad after all, because they've got it a whole lot worse....cue oprah, jeremy, so on and so on...
But there comes a point where the producers, commissioning editors and so on, should realise that there is an effect on society of this uber-pap way beyond that of their precious ratings.

Sharks are in deep trouble. Discovery Channel must wake up to that fact. They must answer our call for more balanced programming, and drop the incessant shark "killing machine" persona present in virtually all of shark week's listings.

Please sign the petition and pass it on to everyone you know.

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