One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest
I’ve just spent five fun-filled days looking after two flu-filled sprogs whilst suffering from the selfsame porcine virus. And on the sixth day, I took my wife to the ER to stop, well, you don’t want to know (nor does she want me to tell you). Although I’ve managed to avoid buying a “I just spent five fun-filled days looking after two flu-filled sprogs and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” t-shirt, my experience has piqued my interest in media coverage of the viral outbreak. The MSM has decided that this is big story because 150 children have died from the swine flu. One-hundred and fifty? As a father, my heart goes out to the kids’ families. That said, “On any given day nearly 700 children are harmed due to accidents on our roadways,” Seattle personal injury lawyer Christopher M. Davis writes. “Of the 250,000 kids injured each year, approximately 2,000 die from their injuries. Children make up about 5% of total fatalities due to car accidents. In fact, for children between the ages of 2 and 14, motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death. . . The failure to wear a seat belt or use a child safety seat is a contributing factor in more than half of the cases involving children who die in car accidents.” As the Dixie Chicks were wont to sing, there’s your trouble.
More by Robert Farago
Comments
Join the conversation
What grinds my gears is that how auto crash fatalities are given so little attention, but the MSM plasters the airwaves whenever young, attractive white women go missing....
I could not agree more with RF. The MSM's love affair with a good scare story has some truly pernicious side effects. It lulls people into worrying about marginal risk like vaccine side-effects while ignoring more serious, immediate risks that they could actually do something about. But even more insidious is that the vaccine-death scare stories convince people not to get themselves and their families vaccinated, thereby increasing the death rate. The people who write and run these stories literally are playing with other people's lives, and they should treat the reporting with a commensurate level of care and caution. They rarely do.
Just wrote a swine flu column for my local newspaper. I compared the marketing strategy to a major doughnut/coffee chain except that the doughnut guys get you through faster and don't scare the hell out of customers.
The media love stories like this because they can blow it out of all proportion and sell lots more newspapers that way. Everyday people love stories like this because they can get het up and nervous and have something to talk about around the watercooler because there is nothing else interesting going on in their lives.