The Great White that Wasn't

[WinstonSmith]

If you follow the news, on Friday you may have heard that reality was resembling fiction: a great white shark was stalking Martha's Vineyard.

In case you don't know, Martha's Vineyard was the filming location for the movie "Jaws" and if you've seen the movie, you know that great white sharks don't belong in Martha's Vineyard because the waters are too cold for them.

If a great white had visited Martha's Vineyard, surely that would be good reason to give credence to the implications of global warming.

Well, what you won't hear reported tomorrow, Monday, is that all of this was a fabrication. Basically, some guy just made the whole thing up.

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If you've followed the story, you might also know that a helicopter pilot later confirmed the sighting.

Of course.

Basically, despite all of the rhetoric given to this story in the press this weekend, let me give you my personal guarnantee that all of this is just a bunch of horse-pucky. Of course, this didn't stop educated people with well-paying jobs and a sense of journalistic duty from pontificating on the supposed issue of killer sharks swimming in the safe waters of Martha's Vineyard.

This is the phenomena that Rush Limbaugh calls "the drive-by media": the media is happy to throw these ideas out, but it claims no responsibility after. Instead, they remain silent and move on to the next thing.

Analagous to a drive-by shooting, they slam information into a crowd, then simply slip away when the consequences of this information comes to fruition. In short, the media doesn't care about the consequences of what they've reported and they don't follow-up. Instead, they just shoot out the latest thing, and by the time culpability becomes a question, they're gone and off to bringing attention to something else.

Isn't it sexy to believe that a great white shark is stalking Martha's Vineyard? Considering how many people have seen the movie "Jaws", isn't it affirming in some way to believe that the character arc of Sheriff Brody, who, in the movie, everyone initially thought was crazy, confirms the collective character arc of humanity itself?

See that? With global warming, even your wildest, utopian dreams can come true.

Who's in the mood for a bet? I don't know what I would bet, but I coulld become a millionaire on this: You won't see Sheriff Brody, Matt Hooper, or Captain Quint, or similar real-life characters, taking to the high seas in pursuit of killing a 20 plus foot great white shark anytime soon. Or ever so long as any of us will live, for that matter.

In fact, at two days, this story is already so old that it will forever disappear into oblivion. Only its power of suggestion will remain.