Shark Attacks

A detailed Summary of Shark Attacks

If a person were to watch the news everyday for a week, any news program, then chances are you will here a story about a shark attack. Over the past month, it seems as if there is at least one new shark attack reported per week. Is this anything new? Have sharks not been attacking people ever since the two began to interact? If this is the case, then why are these types of stories making such a big fuss, and what really is all the fuss about? These attacks have been happening all summer, but this paper will only examine a few of the stories that have affected Americans over the past month or so. Now for the last few years I have taken many different courses on mass communication, which journalism falls under. In these classes I have learned many different parts of journalism and its process, and one of those is how to write in a journalistic way. When I was doing the research for these papers, I found one thing in common in most of them, and that was that they used sensationalism in their stories. I believe this was one of the reasons that I thought the writers had blown these types of stories out of proportion.

One of the first attacks that generated a nationwide frenzy was off of the panhandle of Florida in Pensac

So is it really safe to take a refreshing dip in the ocean in waters where sharks can live? No one knows for sure why all these attacks are happening, and many people are looking in to why, but for know a person can do one of two things. They can listen to the "media outlets scrambling for material in these days of ''24-hour, seven-days-a-week cable news." As quoted by Florida's governor Jeb Bush. (Branom 1) Or the vacationers can take into account the research and study of shark experts who keep reporting that these are random attacks and it is safe to go in the water. Is the media totally blowing these sets of stories totally out of proportion or are they just doing their job? I believe that they are blowing these stories up to more than they believe but that also they are doing their job too; they are just using these stories to fill headlines and get viewers and reader attention. As the year progresses and now especially after what happened in New York and Washington many people will never hear about these stories again, which just goes to show that maybe they were not as important as they were originally making them. So whose fault is it, the sharks or the journalists? No one will ever know, but after reading this I hope that you will come to look twice at stories that scream across headlines of newspapers and think to yourself, is this really all that important, or are people just trying to make it seem important?

As recently as last week shark attacks began happening in other states, all along the coastal waters of the southeast United States. In Virginia, a 10-year-old boy was attacked while surfing with his father, the wounds that he received from the attack by what is believed to be a sandbar shark caused the first fatality in the United States this year. (Barisic 1) Earlier this week a Russian man and his wife were attacked off the shore of a North Carolina beach. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and his wife was rushed to a hospital in critical condition. (Johnson 1) This was the second fatal attack this year in U.S. waters. Many more people were attacked this summer by sharks, and there probably will be a few more attacks over the next few months, but these were the stories that generated the most hype by the press.

All of this hype that was generated by the press raises on big question in many peoples eyes, Why all the hype, all of a sudden? Every year there are shark attacks and fatalities all over the world, so why is this

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Approximate Word count = 1675
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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