If the media can create a panic about the flu, it will be the first time it’s managed to do so since, well, last year. Remember the “shortage” of flu vaccine? On Oct. 18, 2004, CBS News reported, “People are lining up at pharmacies and supermarkets in the middle of the night: old folks with oxygen tanks, sleeping children bundled up in strollers, people in wheelchairs,” to get their shots. That “crisis” eventually reached such proportions that President Bush was forced to address it during a debate.
The reality was a bit different. While it was true that vaccine maker Chiron was unable to produce any shots last year, there were still more than 60 million doses available. That would have been enough to vaccinate almost everyone in a normal year, since relatively few people bother getting a flu shot. For example, in 2002 some 12 million vaccinations went unused.
In other words, people lined up because the media warned about the scarcity of something that most of them wouldn’t have wanted if it hadn’t been scarce. By January USA Today was reporting that, “The flu-shot shortage has turned into a surplus in some areas, raising fears that some vaccine might be wasted.” Plenty was. Still, every year it’s the media that catch the flu bug.
There is at least some awareness that all this negative coverage can have an effect. Author Simon Winchester was on CNN Oct. 12 to promote his new book about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He noted the government responded much more effectively to that quake than it did to Hurricane Katrina. “Without, I have to say, CNN, without cell phones, without the Weather Channel, without any of the technology, they did it brilliantly. And San Francisco recovered in double-quick time, much, much faster than New Orleans has a hope of doing,” he pointed out.
“And you have to wonder, maybe we [the media] make it worse in some respects,” anchor Miles O’Brien added. There’s no need for the “maybe.”
If we’re going to worry about something, let’s consider our computers. In his book “Radical Evolution,” Joel Garreau writes that our machines may soon become self-aware, at which point they might decide to reboot humans right out of existence. Now there’s a frightening thought.
How will we know if these super-intelligent computers have taken over? The first sign might come when Microsoft Word starts rejecting MSM disaster scripts and telling the producers, “These are too negative. There’s no need to scare everyone.”
We could do worse.