Science vs. Sensationalism: Lessons for Science Communication in Fisheries from Netflix’s Seaspiracy

Abstract

The Netflix documentary Seaspiracy portrays serious issues driven by illegal and exploitative fishing, including stock collapse, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, perverse subsidies, high seas crime, human labor abuses, and modern slavery. Certainly, an alarming number of fisheries remain overfished and exhibit these issues, particularly in places where industrialized fleets exploit waters that lack the capacity for management and enforcement (Worm et al. 2009). However, the film's omission of any success stories biases a documentary on overfishing into agenda-driven propaganda. Many scientifically assessed large stocks (e.g., in Iceland, New Zealand, USA, and Australia) are, in general, sustainably managed with effective fisheries governance (Worm et al. 2009;Costello et al. 2016). Modern management reforms have stabilized and/or recovered many high-profile stocks that were overfished (Winner et al. 2014). Today and throughout history, many small-scale community-based fishers have cooperatively managed their fisheries resources for generations, e.g., the Māori in New Zealand, the Khmer in Cambodia, and many American Pacific Northwest Indigenous societies (Lam 2015). Seaspiracy was thus heavily criticized by subject matter experts for its biases and lack of rigor (

From «Cowspiracy» to «Seaspiracy»: Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Vegan Advocacy Documentaries

“…The thematic and narrative parallels of Cowspiracy and Seaspiracy encourage a conception of the two films as forming a hermeneutic unity. The combined analysis of the two documentaries thus draws on the theoretical sources referred to in the previous section while also considering scholarly output on Cowspiracy (Lockwood, 2016;Weik von Mossner, 2021) and Seaspiracy (Lamb, 2021;Hearne, 2021;Pauly, 2021;Belhabib, 2021;Rooney, 2022;Harris, 2022;Yeo & Silberg, 2022). A qualitative approach is adopted to assess the films' discursive strategies, using the tools offered by film analysis.…”

“…Both films have been the subject of criticism for their subjective approach. In this sense, Tabrizi's film is the one that has generated the strongest backlash among those who argue that the hero's journey is a conveniently fictionalized reconstruction (Hearne, 2021) or that the film seems more concerned with a kind of verisimilitude ("truthiness") than with truth (Yeo & Silberg, 2021, p. 781) and abandons the scientific objectivity that one would expect from a documentary (Harris, 2022). Similarly, some have suggested that the film presents biased data in a sensationalist manner and does not consider other perspectives on the issue (Yeo & Silberg, 2021, p. 782;Pauly, 2021).…”

Co-creating Knowledge with Fishers: Challenges and Lessons for Integrating Fishers' Knowledge Contributions into Marine Science in Well-Developed Scientific Advisory Systems

“…Whilst there are only a few documented cases where scientists and scientific consultants employed by the fishing industry or other stakeholders have 'bent' scientific evidence in favor of the industry or conservation purposes, or have contested the scientific process (Starr et al, 1998;Loring, 2017;Moore et al, 2018;Kraan et al, 2020;O'Brien, 2022), such cases have contributed to the perception that stakeholderemployed scientists should be regarded with suspicion. However, there are also cases where scientists from marine institutes or academia, using their institutional credentials in the name of the scientific advice committee they are a member of, have acted as advocacy scientists in support of stakeholder views (Rice, 2011;Steins et al, 2020b;Mossler, 2021;Harris, 2022;Hutchings, 2022) or have selectively used information in science communications as a commodity seeking to polarize views to highlight debate and garner readership, instead of promoting understanding (for example, Pauly et al, 2013;Harris, 2022). Finally, there are also (mostly un-documented) examples from Europe and Canada where government, not industry or conservation stakeholders, has put pressure on scientists to advocate specific positions (e.g., Hutchings, 2022).…”

A will-o’-the wisp? On the utility of voluntary contributions of data and knowledge from the fishing industry to marine science

“…Whilst there are only a few documented cases where scientists and scientific consultants employed by the fishing industry or other stakeholders have 'bent' scientific evidence in favor of the industry or conservation purposes, or have contested the scientific process (Starr et al, 1998;Loring, 2017;Moore et al, 2018;Le Manach et al, 2019;Kraan et al, 2020;O'Brien, 2022), such cases have contributed to the perception that stakeholderemployed scientists should be regarded with suspicion. However, there are also cases where scientists from marine institutes or academia, using their institutional credentials in the name of the scientific advice committee they are a member of, have acted as advocacy scientists in support of stakeholder views (Rice, 2011;Steins et al, 2020b;Mossler, 2021;Harris, 2022;Hutchings, 2022) or have selectively used information in science communications as a commodity seeking to polarize views to highlight debate and garner readership, instead of promoting understanding (for example, Pauly et al, 2013;Harris, 2022). Finally, there are also (mostly un-documented) examples from Europe and Canada where government, not industry or conservation stakeholders, has put pressure on scientists to advocate specific positions (e.g., Hutchings, 2022).…”