Last week, when the environmental NGO Oceana launched a campaign to raise awareness of seafood fraud in the United States, even it couldn’t have predicted how much mainstream media coverage it would receive, even though that’s what it had hoped for.
“I was a little surprised, because it’s not like there was new things in the report. We were very careful and we actually just wanted to try and document and make the case on information already available,” said Michael Hirshfield, Oceana’s senior VP for North America and chief scientist.
“We were hoping, because the way most people interact with the oceans is through eating seafood, that it is would be something that not just environmental or oceans reporters would find interesting and it would reach a broader public,” he explained.
The intent of the report — titled “Bait and Switch: How seafood fraud hurts our oceans, our wallets and our health” and released on 24 May — was not to provide industry with new information, but to educate consumers so that they can use their influence on policymakers to fuel the fight against fraud.
“The way political change happens in this country is really a three-legged stool. You need folks in the government who believe it’s time, people in the industry who believe it’s time and the public to say it’s time as well,” said Hirshfield.
“We’re firmly of the opinion that the public has a role in the sustainable seafood discussion. One of the reasons we though it was important to get the word out is we were increasingly seeing reports about seafood fraud. For us, reaching out to the public through the media was a good way to raise the profile of the issue,” he continued. “We think we can help push the issue with policymakers and decision makers through getting the public engaged.”
The New York Times led the charge, and once the prominent publication ran a story about Oceana’s seafood-fraud report, others quickly followed. The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and Seattle Post Intelligencer — in addition to a host of smaller news outlets — helped spread Oceana’s message.
Hirshfield said all of the coverage was positive, with the majority of publications talking to not just Oceana, but other industry sources to get the full story.
Some questioned Oceana’s motives for releasing the report. (Check out Gavin Gibbon’s blog “Better late than never, I guess.” Gibbons is director of media relations at the National Fisheries Institute and a regular SeafoodSource blogger.)
But Hirshfield isn’t bothered by it, because the organization accomplished its goal of getting the message out to as many media outlets as possible to reach as many consumers as possible. The report resulted in calls and e-mails from government and industry insiders saying “thank you” for putting the issue in the spotlight, said Hirshfield.
“There aren’t many opportunities, it seems, in the fisheries conservation world where organizations like ours and the seafood industry see eye-to-eye,” said Hirshfield. “I’m sure they’ll be disagreements along the way on what might end up being the right outcome. But it seems like a real opportunity for us, because we think it’s good for the oceans and for consumers to have more information than less. It’s not our highest, goal but we think it’s right and fair that American fishermen who are doing the right thing should not be undermined by cheap substitutes.”
(Check out SeaFood Business Associate Editor James Wright’s 26 May commentary “Little bites into seafood fraud.”)
