A decent, short commentary on the role of newspapers in spreading bad news:
Hay added that swine flu is different because the species barrier between pigs and humans is much lower. Yet this time, the press has been less hysterical. The story broke on Saturday 25 April, but four Sundays didn’t even put it on the front page and the Sunday Times and NoW placed it on page two, traditionally the page for news thought vaguely important but intrinsically boring.
True, Sunday papers don’t like news on Saturdays, because it usurps the scoopettes (“Apprentice star: I’m a swinger”, revealed the NoW). But did editors also think, if only subliminally, “flu pandemic, been there, done that”?
Perhaps, too, some editors are beginning to realise their interests do not lie in spreading panic. The conspiracy theories are already circulating on the internet: swine flu is caused by a genetically engineered virus released from a laboratory, either accidentally or deliberately; it’s a scare invented by governments to distract attention from their mishandling of finances. At times like this, people turn to newspapers for reliable risk assessment, not for more spurious alarm.
The redtops seemed inclined to treat swine flu almost as a joke. “Pigs ‘ere” was the Sun’s splash headline on Tuesday. A leader counselled: “Britain is one of the best-prepared countries on earth. So the last thing we need is for families or governments to panic.” The paper’s columnist Fergus Shanahan made the very unSun-like point that malaria, which kills millions of Africans, has a bigger claim to be called a world health emergency.
Nevertheless, it’s hard for news journalists to suppress instincts to highlight the most alarming prognostications. Several papers, and particularly the Daily Mail, gave prominence to Professor Nigel Dimmock, a Warwick University virologist, who warned “this has the potential to be bigger than Spanish influenza”, the 1918 pandemic that may have killed 50 million worldwide. Dimmock, as no newspaper mentioned, founded a university spin-off company called ViraBiotech, which is seeking investment to develop “an entirely new method of protecting against flu” (I quote from a press release smartly issued by Warwick University last Monday, with a footnote admitting it was using “the current heightened global concern” to help raise funds). I do not suggest this influenced Dimmock’s views in any way. But it would be helpful if newspapers informed us of these things.
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But I am not sure the press can take much credit. Scares come and go – millennium bugs, BSE, Islamist terror, bird flu, swine flu – and they are all treated in much the same way. There is no hierarchy of alarm and habitual non-alarmists, such as the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins and the Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, are equally indiscriminate in denouncing politicians and lobbyists as self-interested scaremongers. The only modifying factor is the existence of other exciting news, such as the travails of a crumbling government. The danger is that, having lived through so many scares that came to nothing, readers don’t recognise a real cause for concern. The British are often praised for being phlegmatic in a crisis. With a press like ours, they have to be.