Apparently in our quest to make EVERYTHING racist, the Washington Post has now dubbed Discovery channel's popular "Shark Week" as racist for "lack of diversity" and featuring too many white men as experts.
Especially white men named Mike.
You thought I was joking, didn't you?
Here's a taste of the madness from WaPo:
Lisa Whitenack loved sharks as a kid. She spent rainy days leafing through a guide to sharks in Reader's Digest. Every summer, she would watch "Shark Week," Discovery's annual TV event that spotlights the ocean predator with seven days of dedicated programming.
But when the scientists appeared on her TV screen, she rarely saw any women she could look up to.
"Why would I know I could do that?" Whitenack said. "I don't come from a family of scientists. I didn't see very many people that looked like me on television."
This woman didn't see women shark experts on TV so her default was to assume "women can't research sharks"?
What kind of nonsense is this?
Since then, Lisa has gotten into the field of research but it seems less like she's researching shark and instead researching ways to be offended and carry out a weird sort of revenge on Discovery Network.
Whitenack led a team of researchers to examine hundreds of "Shark Week" episodes that aired between 1988 and 2020. In a study published last month by the Public Library of Science, their research claims that Discovery's programming emphasized negative messages about sharks, lacked useful messaging about shark conservation and overwhelmingly featured White men as experts — including several with the same name.
The programming featured more White experts and commentators named "Mike" than women, said David Shiffman, a conservationist at Arizona State University who was a co-author of the study.
So... Whitenack is just a bitter feminist who watches literal HOURS of Shark Seek so she can criticize the programming and carry out a hateful vendetta against a television program about sharks.
Wokeness is a mental disease.
But Whitenack and Bohannon agreed that the biggest concern was with the program's lack of diversity and how that might shape young scientists' perceptions of marine biology and whether they could enter the field.
"Diversity in people brings diversity in thought, which ultimately brings innovation," Bohannon said. "Being able to see someone who looks like you in this field really has an impact."
This is so mind-numbingly stupid it boggles the mind.
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon summarizes the argument of the article quite well:
