Did you know that thousands of people die every year from the flu? Not avian flu, or swine flu, or boogaloo-who-are-you-the-world's-going-to-end science fiction flu.
My mom told me about this. She was upset because she was in an office that was blaring the blaring cable news headlines. Be afraid! That was the headline.
I started thinking about news and ratings, which are as much the bottom line of a television newsroom as the bottom line is the bottom line to corporate management. Fear always works to drive ratings.
This is not to say swine flu is not serious. And it's part of human nature to imagine the next apocalyptic thing. In the Middle Ages, it was the hand of God in the form of the plague. Nowadays, we can worry about the fascist-corporate police state wreaking environmental Armageddon or taking guns and turning us into Matrix-like batteries. Some of us look for signs that God is behind all this.
I don't know the balance between hyping stuff to scare people into watching and simply reporting the news, the beautiful, dirty day-in and day-out -- make that second-by-second -- flow of stories about ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live. Which is sometimes scary.
Still, the coverage of the swine flu reminded me of the coverage of the Drug War.
Yes, many many people were killed in the Drug War in 2008 in Mexico. Cities have been destabilized, and there's debate about the extent to which Mexico is destabilized. But if you compare the murder rate in Mexico's Drug War cities to the murder rate in the most violent U.S. communities, suddenly a different picture emerges (and, as a side note, if you see the Drug War as a battle between cartels for market supremacy, instead of a response to a law enforcement crackdown, another different picture emerges). With respect to the murder rate, what you won't see on U.S. television are cable news reporters standing on the freeway overlooking, say, Oakland with a red and black graphic denoting instability and violence and breathlessly questioning whether the U.S. needs to send troops and whether the violence spill over into San Francisco.
Yes, there's swine flu. And it's killed more than 100 people in Mexico. There are about 100 cases in the U.S., although the number is climbing.
But to the extent that it poses a looming threat, does it warrant the blaring cable news headlines? Can news be news, with context and without the hype?
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