ON OVER-HYPING "PANDEMIC"

EAGER COVERAGE

We seem to be moving to the next stage in the morphing of the global Swine Flu crisis, as this Wall Street Journal piece describes:

"The United Nations public health agency raised its global pandemic alert level on Monday to "phase 4" from "phase 3," recognizing that the A/H1N1 virus is spreading from person to person and urging countries to prepare for a pandemic. Moving it up one notch, to "phase 5," would indicate that the virus is causing multiple outbreaks, or widespread human infection.

With multiple outbreaks in Mexico and human transmission now occurring in New York City, where people at a school in Queens were infected after some students traveled to Mexico, the disease has moved closer to that definition, Dr. Fukuda said."

As always in these types of situations, the mainstream media is almost ahead of the evolving reality, with almost every other report having the word "Pandemic" in it in one form or another.  This Business & Media Institute piece is on point:

“Are we on the verge of a swine flu pandemic?” That was a question asked by Larry King for CNN on April 27, but also by many Americans since April 24 as the number of confirmed cases around the world grew.

NBC’s Robert Bazell said the government didn’t “want people to panic,” but then panicked viewers saying “it appears to be an outbreak unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”

That scary, hyped tone reflected how many in the media covered the swine flu. Some media outlets hyped the threat with nearly constant coverage, worst-case scenarios or comparisons to the 1918 Spanish flu, while many others missed crucial points of the swine flu story, including the former president’s work to prepare in case of a pandemic flu and the issue of border security with Mexico."

Some in the media are taking note of this heightened focus on "pandemic", as the article goes on to describe:

"Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume and media critic Howard Kurtz both criticized the national news media for portraying the outbreak as “a full-blown crisis.” Hume called it “much ado about – I’m afraid to say this – not very much.” Kurtz particularly noted the “front-page headlines, constant cable-news updates and top-story status on the evening newscasts.”

Though most media accounts were less hyperbolic than NBC and AP’s, the word pandemic cropped up in fifteen stories on the three networks in four days (April 25-28). During that same time, CNN used “pandemic” in 51 stories and Fox News Channel in 10 stories according to Nexis."

It's too much to ask of course, but it'd really be something if the media for once tried to keep pace with this story, rather than gallop way ahead of it.

In the meantime, for a more balanced perspective on the situation, check out this piece by Dr. Mercola on the Mercola medical site.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

As I write this, we now know that it is a pandemic - ie global epidemic - or at least global and becoming epidemic.

I rarely pay attention to the news media for science issues - they rarely get it right. Of course creating a scare or pooh-poohing the risks is what they do, to pander to their audiences.