I’m all for introducing people to knew things, and reading about things I didn’t know about before, but this is just not honest reporting. It’s designed to get passed around on Facebook and if they make it seem ordinary, people won’t pass it around.
They’ve taken a Facebook post, and editorialized it specifically to make it sound very special.
If you wrote the same article about someone catching a salmon would you say “the fish was identified as a salmon”?
They also could have easily said “these fish are common in coastal waters, and caught and eaten all the time” but they purposefully left that out.
What surprises me is that BBC is offloading content from FB and making it their 'articles'/'news'.
At the bottom of the 'article' there is a snippet:
> The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original post on Facebook
From top of the page it looks like standard news piece, filed under World / US & Canada. The 'article' does not mention that "it’s weird, but a known fish" as @aikinai stated in another comment. All of this is troubling.
The BBC have been making questionable editorial decisions over the last couple years in an effort to compete in the online news space. I imagine under the guise of keeping viewers around for the "real" hard hitting news stuff. The click bait is definitely growing.
I've also noticed they've become extremely trigger happy with regard to what can be classified as "breaking news". The label has lost all importance from being overused.
They’ve taken a Facebook post, and editorialized it specifically to make it sound very special.
If you wrote the same article about someone catching a salmon would you say “the fish was identified as a salmon”?
They also could have easily said “these fish are common in coastal waters, and caught and eaten all the time” but they purposefully left that out.