| | |  Editorials | Issues | May 2009 
Blaming ‘Media Hype’ for Swine Flu Fears
 Robert Mackey - New York Times
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 |  | This past week has presented the world’s news media with a conundrum: How loudly should a responsible person shout (or whisper) “Possible Fire!” in a crowded theater? |  | | |
Warnings by public health officials this week that the spread of a new strain of H1N1 swine flu meant that a global pandemic was “imminent” were followed by the clarification that the word pandemic will be used “even if the new virus turns out to cause mainly mild symptoms.” The situation presented the world’s news media with a conundrum: How loudly should a responsible person shout (or whisper) “Possible Fire!” in a crowded theater?
The question has been easy to answer for broadcasters, Web sites and newspapers that see the world in tabloid terms. In London, the free commuter newspaper Metro started its coverage on Sunday with the headline “Swine flu ‘could kill up to 120m’,” over a picture of Mexican police with masks and machine guns.
Likewise, no one has been shocked that many anchors on 24-hour-a-day cable news channels, which have a lot of time to fill, have spent a good deal of it hyperventilating. These days, that is to be expected — after all, Jon Stewart makes a very good living pointing out night after night that those channels tend to overreact at some stage to almost every crisis they report. That’s what they do.
Then you have public health officials around the world who are trying to stress that people should be prepared for an emergency, even if one never materializes. To continue the metaphor, they are just whispering loudly, “Make sure the theater has fire extinguishers!”
As Monica Davey reports in today’s New York Times, a result of all this is that many non-experts in influenza have found this week’s media coverage of the H1N1 swine flu virus confusing, if not infuriating. Ms. Davey found that many Americans were engaged in the balancing act of trying to stay informed about the dangers without getting carried away by fear — and as they did, some people she spoke to “complained bitterly about the news media’s ‘over-hyping’ of the matter.”
Several readers of The Lede have posted comments echoing that sentiment. Now that news cycles have sped up the rate at which information spreads, it also seems to have sped up the rate at which people become overloaded with information — and then blame the news media for not doing a better job of communicating clearly the exact risks posed by threats like potential flu pandemics or brewing hurricanes.
On Thursday, for instance, a reader named Carl N. wrote a comment on this blog:
I don’t get it. Why are we so worried? Every winter influenza takes tens of thousands of lives! Does the media realize this? Why are they acting like every single (even nonfatal) case means we are about to hit by the bubonic plague?
The same day, another reader, using the screen name CB, asked:
Why is this flu getting so much attention? Other than the severe pocket in Mexico, it doesn’t seem to be more deadly than the “regular” flu. And even the Mexican statistics are still rolling in, so can we be sure it’s even that bad there? Does this flu’s rate of transmission somehow correlate with an ability to mutate into something worse? Are the C.D.C. and W.H.O. really just practicing for something worse? The amount of panic weighed against the actual numbers is very off kilter.
Then on Thursday in Texas, when Fort Worth closed every school in the city and sent 80,000 students home to prevent the spread of infection, Gov. Rick Perry said that the state’s problems were being exacerbated by “a substantial amount of media hype.”
So, with the blame-the-media reaction in full flow, some parts of the media sprang into action by trying to jump on the anti-media bandwagon. Ben Goldacre, a British doctor who writes — in columns, blog and books — about the perils of what he calls “Bad Science,” pointed out in an article for The Guardian on Thursday that at least some media outlets were trying to get in on the backlash against the media’s coverage of the swine flu outbreak.
Dr. Goldacre began by defending the media’s coverage of what still could be the very early stages of a serious outbreak: “Everyone is just saying: we don’t know, it could be bad, and the newspapers are reporting that. Sure, there’s a bit of vaudeville in the headlines, but they’re not saying things that are wrong.” Then he detailed the calls he received from various media outlets that, incorrectly, expected him to appear on their programs to say that the media was making too much of the threat posed by swine flu:
By Tuesday, pundit-seekers from the media were suddenly contacting me, a massive nobody, to say that swine flu is all nonsense and hype, like some kind of blind, automated naysaying device. “Will you come and talk about the media overhyping swine flu?” asked Case Notes on Radio 4. No. “We need someone to say it’s all been overhyped,” said BBC Wales. [...]
In the time that I have been writing this piece – no embellishment – I’ve had similar calls off This Week at the BBC (”Is the coverage misleading?”), Al-Jazeera English (”We wanted to talk to someone on the other side, you know, challenging the fear factor”), the Richard Bacon Show on Five Live (”Is it another media scare like Sars and bird flu?”) and many more.
I’m not showing off. I know I’m a D-list public intellectual, but I just think it’s interesting: because not only have the public lost all faith in the media; not only do so many people assume, now, that they are being misled; but more than that, the media themselves have lost all confidence in their own ability to give us the facts.
In his article, and in a subsequent audio interview with The Guardian, Dr. Goldacre argues that the problem is that besides now not trusting the media — which has perhaps cried wolf one, or 7,000 times too often in recent years — the public in general is “poorly equipped to think around issues involving risk.” While, as he says “infectious diseases epidemiology is a tricky business: the error margins on the models are wide, and it’s extremely hard to make clear predictions,” the demand from many media consumers seems to be: ‘Tell us exactly what is going to happen and how bad it will be.’
In response to the suggestion that current reporting on the risk of a dangerous swine flu pandemic might later seem to be as unnecessary as earlier reporting on the grave risk of pandemic outbreaks of SARS or bird flu, Dr. Goldacre says, simply: “They were risks, risks that didn’t materialise, but they were still risks. That’s what a risk is. I’ve never been hit by a car, but it’s not idiotic to think about it.”
So what is the answer for confused media consumers in an era of 24/7 television and Internet coverage? Possibly it is just this: first, people may need to abandon their hope that the many, many voices that make up the world’s media today will suddenly start singing as a chorus, and figure out which of those many voices seem to regularly deliver credible information. Then, as Dr. Goldacre advises, we may all have to accept that disease forecasting — like weather forecasting — is more of a guide to what might happen that a certain prediction of what will happen.
The analogy that might be most useful in thinking about the “boy who cried wolf” problem is what happened before Hurricane Katrina: Many people simply refused to believe, after years of warnings about hurricanes that turned out to be less than apocalyptic, that there was any need to evacuate the city. That’s not to say that every disease outbreak will turn into a dangerous pandemic, any more than every storm will turn into a Katrina-sized emergency — but keeping an eye on the weather forecast is still a good idea. |
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