An interesting look at the Swine Flu reporting
An insightful observation from Jerry Pournelle in his monthly
Computing at Chaos Manor:
The Conficker Worm is still out there, but we got through April without its crashing the entire Internet. (See last month's column.) The current panic (dying out as I write this) is over swine flu. One Hong Kong hotel quarantined all the guests while rushing a suspected swine flu victim to hospital. A Dulles-bound aircraft from Europe did an emergency landing in Boston because one passenger had symptoms. It was later determined that she had a bad cold. Mexico City was a ghost town last week, although we hear that they are now allowing restaurants to open again (but the waiters wear masks). We now know that the swine flu isn't as severe as the usual seasonal flu that kills 30,000 or so people in the US every year, and there are some indications that we're standing down from the panic, but there are still schools closing and school proms being cancelled.
I confess being a bit puzzled here. The Internet allows news to spread very quickly, and perhaps that contributes, but the swine flu panic seems more driven by conventional mainstream media than the Internet. Indeed, the Internet was quick to disseminate the true information about the low death rates and comparatively low severity of this particular flu; that this was, in fact, not much different from an early appearance of an annual seasonal flu. The panic happened anyway. Apparently the denizens of the Internet don't include the public authorities responsible for all the panic? I'd think there's a lesson in there, but I am not sure what it is.
Maybe it is a manifestation of the same disconnect with reality that is causing newspaper readership to tank. The MSM have painted themselves into a corner with their very obvious biases while it is the "town commons" property of the internet that allows news to be fact-checked so quickly -- the accuracy is higher and with so many people reporting on the same events, each persons bias is easy to see so it is possible to get a clear picture of what actually happened.
Posted by DaveH at May 14, 2009 8:06 PM