Swine flu! Run! or Not

Unless one has been living under a rock, they have heard of the swine flu. Actually, most are afraid. This post comes right after a guy that one of my family members works with was fired because he had to come into the school 2 a.m. to disinfect a room top to bottom and the next day was tired, when asked why he was sluggish, the man replied that he had been up all night disinfected a room because a kid who had symptoms of the flu (not swine) had a class in there. The whole second floor of the building cleared out. Ironically, it was the medical classes. The man was then fired. He was fired over a witch hunt that has been building.
John Stewart, the political pundit, had a segment on his comedy central show The Daily Show, called “Last 100 Days,” in case you’re not following, it is a play on the media circus covering the swine flu. Stewart provides comedy in the face of news networks that have sensationalized their headlines and stories. In the U.S. there have only been 40 confirmed cases and the only one that has died was a 23-month-old Mexican baby. The regular strain of flu can have the same impact on a baby’s health. But the media has taken it and ran with it.
Let’s look at some headlines from the news, shall we? “Survivors recall 1918 flu pandemic,” “More than 70 Mexicans Quarantined in China,” and—my favorite; “Swine flu hysteria spanning global outdoors realm; is any place safe?”
Schools have closed as well and President Barack Obama has declared that it is a good idea to close them but only if conditions worsen. Fox news DC has written “President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that school closings may be necessary in an escalating global health emergency that claimed the first death in the United States and swept Germany onto the roster of afflicted nations.” The use of wording has made it seem much worse than it has. In fact, a broadcast showed St. Francis prep school faculty with masks and said that the school won’t be able to contain the strain (what is this the movie Outbreak?) John Stewart simply laughs and says jokingly that it will go to other prep schools as well. As a matter of fact, the students have all recovered.
In the state of panic, one should watch the Daily Show rather than the real news networks that are showing what appears to be false information as in the outline of Canada in red. Which had only six cases but then again, it’s probably natural to cover that big nation in red—right Fox?
One thing that shouldn’t be over looked though is that the Daily Show isn’t a news program. They do make light of it because it is almost comical that this has been labeled as a pandemic. But he does make light of the deaths in Mexico. Nothing is funny about death, especially, a country that doesn’t have a good a system of health care, according to the 2008 Mexico profile from the Library of Congress. That is where objectiveness goes out the window. That was never mentioned. However, Rachel Smolkin, from American Journalism Review writes “Has our slavish devotion to journalism fundamentals--particularly our obsession with "objectivity"--so restricted news organizations that a comedian can tell the public what's going on more effectively than a reporter?” This statement in the face of the facts of Mexico and Stewarts joking is rendered useless. The objectivity of a reporter (a good reporter) would have said that instead of making a joke. News is news, no matter how you put it.
But as much as we scoff at these false reports, we are just as responsible. In chapter 37 of Communication in History, Mitchell Stephens writes “it is remarkable that television journalists have not adopted more sensationalistic techniques to cater to this largest of mass audiences.” We do gravitate towards sensationalistic headlines and stories that sound worse than they really are. If we didn’t have the media background we had from MCS 222 and the Daily Show, would we be following this as closely as the uneducated are?
It does seem that the media is silently (or maybe it’s the five second attention span) reeling after putting their foot in their mouth. Now the media is calling it the H1N1 and to in the process of finding overreacting headlines, I noticed that a lot of them mysteriously have disappeared or were hidden.
This isn’t to say that this is serious but this witch hunt/hypochondriac behavior isn’t new (remember anthrax?); the media has always taken a bad situation and made it worse, but Anderson Cooper and Fox news doesn’t want you to freak out, even though their first reports were “Breaking news a fast moving new strain of the flu, and at this hour the death toll is rising.”