Word: sharked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could mean something else. Shark Week--returning Aug. 2 to Discovery Channel--is not actually a week when people get attacked by sharks. It is a decades-old TV ritual in which millions of people watch in awe of toothy monsters that will never get within biting distance of most...
...live every week like it's Shark Week, then, might be a metaphor for living in our media environment: to spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor...
Coincidentally, one of the best recent critiques of how media overkill works is airing during Shark Week. Summer is high season for media freak-outs. This year, we've had celebrity deaths, political sex scandals and a conspiracy theory that President Obama was born outside the U.S., revived by the likes of CNN's Lou Dobbs. Sharkbite Summer (Aug. 4) looks back eight years to when a few high-profile shark attacks sent the media into their own feeding frenzy. The summer of 2001, postrecount and pre-9/11, was notoriously slow on news. (Hence, it was also the season...
...movie chronicles, minor attacks suddenly made headlines--a surfer recalls getting bit on the leg and a news van beating the ambulance to the scene. TV choppers swarmed the Gulf of Mexico, and Larry King asked, "Are sharks rebelling?" (Full disclosure: TIME ran a "Summer of the Shark" cover.) But by season's end, fewer people had been attacked by sharks in the U.S. than during the summer before...
...Colony, every week is Shark Week. And what with upcoming apocalypse movies like The Road and 2012 and the end-of-days rumblings of talk TV and radio, the same is now true for the rest of us. Superterrorists, natural disasters and megaviruses are not imaginary. But they're more viscerally scary and easier to apprehend than vital but boring systemic problems like the economy and public health...