Cetaceans in the Media: A Right Whale of a Story
Ian Porter Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Introduction
It was like a multiple murder mystery. Who or what was killing North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of St Lawrence? Why so many? And—in the summer of 2017—what were so many whales even doing in the Gulf? By September, 12 whales had been found dead and news of each tolled like a bell. Cetacean biologists say that barely 500 North Atlantic right whales re- main. Hunted almost to extinction two centuries ago, their survival as a species is an issue of urgent concern for marine scientists and environmentalists. The deaths were a staggering loss for an endangered species and they caught inter- national media attention. In Atlantic Canada, the whales’ plight became the ‘Story of the Summer’. Print, broadcast, and online media had news about them almost daily. Reports told of observers’ surprise at their large numbers in the Gulf and of speculation about the effect of climate change on migration patterns. Environmentalists blamed some deaths on entanglement in fishing gear. Necropsies implicated ‘ship strikes’—hit-and-run collisions with tankers, cruise ships and other large vessels. Chasing so many leads was a tough test of the capacity of the news media to cover events out of sight of land. For members of the ocean community—scientists and environmentalists—it was an opportunity to de- ploy impressive media skills on behalf of animals they had come to know well through years of research and activism.
As Told through a Lens
A stream of visuals sustained the momentum of the media coverage. Pictures of whales are compelling. They are elite mammals, enormous, smart, and talk- ative. They travel in families and surface for photo ops. Pictures of whales, liv- ing and dead, and of people looking at whales and the remains of whales told the story on television and in social media and drew readers to folio features in newspapers. By itself, a 60-tonne whale pulled up for a necropsy on a beach is an arresting image, especially when people in protective scrubs are slicing into the huge body and using the arm of a backhoe to roll back thick layers of
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blubber. Crowds of onlookers complete the impression of communities ener- gized by wonder and pity. Fresh images from many sources kept the story from fading. Without pic- tures, reports of a whale floating lifeless at sea are worth, at most, a few lines of script. Newsroom budgets rarely provide for the boat or helicopter needed to shoot events out of sight of land. Increasingly, producers rely on outside sources for pictures to tell ocean stories. The federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (dfo) supplied one widely shared image, that of pathologist Dr. Pierre-Yves Dumont squatting precarious- ly on a whale carcass awash in the Gulf.1 The Marine Animal Response Society (mars) and the World Wildlife Fund (wwf) also provided the media with boat-based video. Environmental groups understand well the value of visuals as support both for advocacy and fundraising. As one reporter puts it, offshore video that tells a story is like ‘catnip’ to television programmers.
Commitment and Complexity
A striking example of media reliance on outside sources came with the death of Joe Howlett, a fisherman from Campobello Island, New Brunswick, who was killed 10 July while freeing an entangled whale in the Gulf. News coverage focused on his commitment and sacrifice. Tributes that showed him in action on a whale-rescue boat used pictures from a promotional video posted on YouTube the year before by the International Federation for Animal Welfare. His death had an immediate impact. Authoriti