bird flu from asia?

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by Rog

my sentiments exactly mate!. half the people in the uk who have contracted this deadly virus are out of hospital and saying it was like a heavy cold. A bit of a warning would have been enough instead of the massive fuckin media overkill we are presently experiencing.
maybe in a few years when we really do have something serious happening then everyone will be like 'yeah yeah....we've heard it all before' and we'll all die.....'the media who cried wolf'?

ask anyone in toronto how they feel about the media's handling of SARS.

Cacaophony, the argument, it seems to me, boils down to whether or not you can say the media acted responsibly *EVEN IF* the worst case scenario was realized. Clearly the answer is no. Even if this thing turned into spanish flu, the media was not informative, it was stoking anxiety. To prove that point, someone can simply sit through the days of american network television coverage and count how many minutes were spent covering actual facts and information and how many minutes were spent covering looped, fetishized, stories of anxiety. Would I be making an up-at-night assumption if I claimed to know how that experiment would turn out?