That's what ""MERMAIDS: THE BODY FOUND" was trying to find out, and it's a fascinating story, whatever you believe. Maybe there's a little bit of truth in those myths? Why is that? Why do societies on opposite sides of the planet still talk about half-woman, half-fish creatures? Is it coincidence, or is there something deeper lying there in our unconsciousness. Most cultures across the planet have myths about Mermaids. The fairytale about the little mermaid who lived in an underwater kingdom is well known. To read more, follow us on Twitter, and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. But lasting damage to the public’s trust in science has already been dealt.įuture Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. There is hope: After receiving significant criticism for its programming, Discovery’s head of programming announced in 2015 that the company would phase out these kinds of programming, at least for Shark Week. There is no easy solution, and the success of many of these shows means that the fake documentary phenomenon is here to stay. David Shiffman and I published a guide to how scientists can respond and, more importantly, prepare, in the event that they find their research misrepresented through documentary and reality programs that are fabricated, either wholly or in part. Following the first airing of Mermaids: The Body Found, my website, Southern Fried Science, began a concerted effort to respond to that particular flavor of fake documentary. Though media empires like Discovery Communications have a reach that far exceeds the average citizen, social media and other web-based platforms have provided a venue through which knowledgeable parties can respond to this disinformation and boost the voices of subject experts who can respond directly to false of misleading claims. This makes it incredibly difficult for scientists to mount a proportional response when their discipline, research area, or even their own lab and research, are used for fodder in these fabricated documentaries. Unfortunately, major cable networks have vastly greater reach than all but the biggest research institutes. Even the classic and fondly remembered nature program Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom has come under scrutiny for staging scenes that resulted in animal cruelty complaints. Despite later revelations that, far from documenting natural behavior, the scene was staged and filmmakers chased the animals off a cliff, “lemmings” continues to endure as a metaphor for blindly following a crowd to self-destructive ends. Disney’s Academy Award–winning White Wilderness, a 1958 feature that explored wildlife in the high Arctic, famously featured a scene of lemmings so driven with migratory frenzy that they hurled themselves off of a cliff into the freezing sea. Later interviews revealed that significant parts of the film had been staged and bore little similarity to the lives of Inuit hunters at the time. Nanook of the North, a 1922 silent film that captures the daily life of an Inuk man in the Canadian Arctic, is often considered to be the first feature-length documentary. Documentarians have thrived off manufactured moments since the birth of the format. Partially or entirely fabricated nature documentaries aren’t a new development.
NOAA was so inundated with complaints that it had to issue its own press release declaring that mermaids were not real and that there was no evidence of their existence. And NOAA, of course, was directly accused of hiding evidence about the existence of mermaids.
#Mermaids the body found full
Actual shark scientists were looped into the Shark Week narrative, often filmed without full knowledge of the theme and purpose of the documentary. Submarine blamed a real ferry accident, in which several passengers lost their lives, on a made-up shark the search and rescue operators who performed admirably in their response to the accident had to issue a release disavowing Discovery Communications. Unlike works of pure fiction, the stories were framed around real events and real people and institutions. Discovery opened Shark Week 2013, its single most popular annual event, with Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives.
#Mermaids the body found series
Mermaids was a success, and Discovery launched a series of compelling, yet fabricated, documentaries to capitalize on the ratings boom, including a pair of shows reporting on the continued existence of Megalodon (a giant and definitively extinct shark species), as well as shows about “Old Hitler” (a 60-year-old rogue hammerhead) and “Submarine” (a monster shark that sunk ferries and fishing vessels in South Africa).
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