Sneeze, Oink, Oink

You have to hand it to them, when the media get fixated by an idea, then there's no changing their one track minds.

Here's a quote from a Gold Coast media person from his social networking page:

...sitting outside the Gold Coast hospital watching for people wearing masks. You wouldn't guess how many have offered to go buy a mask and walk by for me !

Someone else replied:

...that's what i've done for the last two days, where were you then?

The lead story in just about all of the media outlets over the past week has been an increase in swine flu infections in Australia.

At right you'll see a screen shot of today's Courier Mail front page, complete with infection 'counter'.

That's the number of people infected mind you, not the number of people who've died.

In Australia, the flu season claims 3000 lives on average - that's double the road toll. The number of people who died from swine flu in Australia is zero.

According today's news from Agence France Presse, 104 people have died worldwide in this outbreak. That's all.

For comparison, around the world 6000 people die on the job each day, 18,000 children die from hunger each day, 3000 people die each day in car crashes.

Why the fixation on this relatively minor medical situation?

It's about "news value", one of the least well defined concepts in modern marketing.

News value is, effectively, the subjective opinion of one person in a newsroom (usually the news editor) who marshals the assets of the newsroom towards one particular story or angle.

In the small world in which many journalists inhabit, the fixation on one story spread faster than, pardon the pun, swine flu.

The problem with ramping up hysteria is the media undermines its credibility. Here are a couple of comments from today's Courier Mail article:

Yawn! No we have a flu counter on the home page. If we had a counter of how many people each year die of Malaria the counter would read between 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 after 12 months.
Posted by: Jon of Eatons Hill 3:07pm today

Who cares...? For heaven's sake, it's just one strain of flu amidst so many others. Many more people die annually in Aus and overseas from other flu strains than from this one, it's not even that bad. It's all a media buildup.
Posted by: Roger of Brisbane 3:42pm today

Can we post the numbers of the people who have got the good old garden variety flu next to the Swine Flu? I am yet to understand the difference between the two and why there is so much fuss. People worldwide die of the garden variety flu every year.
Posted by: K of Birkdale 4:26pm today
Comment 72 of 72

I wonder if they will decrement the Flu Counter on the front page when an 'INFECTED' person is given the all clear?

Posted by: Bored IT Worker of a Boring Office 4:25pm today
Comment 71 of 72