Thursday, April 30, 2009

Local News Says: You are Going to Die

Well, I was not blogging throughout the winter, when the local news station that I always watch with morbid fascination was setting new lows with its horrendous weather coverage. There was a big blizzard that the station tracked for 800 miles, giving us daily, sometimes hourly progress reports, as though it were an imminent emergency. It's not so much the interruptions of regular programming I object to, as the tone of "panic now!" throughout the coverage. Stock up on provisions, we'll report up to the minute, that, oh wait... no, the storm missed us. We got a fraction of an inch. Sensational stories designed to scare people. Murders, drunk drivers, dirty dining, all the imminent threats that are never quantized because they'd be exposed as trivial.

Well, now it's the swine flu. One night it was, "swine flu is spreading rapidly in Wisconsin" followed by the schitzophrenic allowance that Wisconsin has zero confirmed cases, and its three suspected cases were all people that had recovered. The next night, the line was that "concern about the SWINE FLU IS SPREADING RAPIDLY" -- get that? concern is spreading. They had a demonstration about "how easily the virus could spread" by having the reporter go to the mall and shake hands with strangers and say, "and that's all it could take." Followed by him washing his hands (in a manner that would be a good example of how not to wash hands). They also had a man on the street who said the night before -- without being contradicted -- that he wasn't worried because it's not like you could get it shaking hands. Why do they feature laypeople expressing expert opionions about things they know nothing about? They also declared a pandemic, when the WHO had declared a level three potential epidemic, pandemic being level six. They also show a lot of people earing masks, although experts are dubious about masks. They told people not to go to the hospital, where the professional advise is to call first and then go. (I also think it presumed a lot to tell people to call their doctors -- how many thousands of us in the viewing area have no doctor?)

A list of my general gripes: (1) They use or misuse specialized vocabulary without defining it. (2) They give extremely oversimplified or false information. (3) They use suggestion or innuendo to hype a crisis and create alarm. (4) They solicit or offer unqualified opinions. And (5) they have a lead story that they cover night after night, and spend each night correcting the previous night's mistakes rather than just doing the work to get it right in the first place. Wouldn't it be good to learn the basic facts first, and then worry about clever ways to present them?

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